There are a lot of different ways it could be done.

But mainly, all you need is a database with 2 fields: realURL and tinyURL.

When someone submits a realURL asking for a tinyURL, you check to see if that realURL is already there.

If so, you give them the tinyURL that already exists for it.

If not, you use some random method to generate tinyURLs until you get one that's not already in your database, insert (realURL, tinyURL) in the database, and give them the new tinyURL.

When a tinyURL request comes in to your website, you generate an http-redirect request to the realURL.

Actually generating random strings is pretty easy -- you could just have an array of "printable" characters like 

my @printable=('a'..'z','A'..'Z','0'..'9');

[download]
, and use 
my $tiny=join "",map {$printable[rand(scalar @printable)]} 1..10;

[download]
to generate "tiny" strings until you get one that's not in your table already...

Mike

In reply to Re: Long url to tiny url. by RMGir
in thread Long url to tiny url. by valavanp

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