General Question

Newboston's avatar

What's wrong with this simple PHP script?

Asked by Newboston (2points) March 9th, 2011 from iPhone

I’m trying to make a simple page that uses the TinyURL API to generate a short URL, but something is going wrong. No matter what I do, I’m getting the same error every time. I’m suspecting it may be a host-related issue, or maybe even an error on TinyURL’s side? The error is “Unexpected T_VARIABLE at line 6.” I’m hosting with GoDaddy. Is there something I need to configure? I’m not sure what the deal is, but please take a look, here’s the code:

<?php

$long = $_POST[‘long_url’];

function shorten($the_long_url) {
    $short = file_get_contents(‘http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=’.$the_long_url);
    return $short;
}

echo (shorten($long));

?>

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4 Answers

6rant6's avatar

Do you need a concatenation operator (.) between your string and the variable name ($the_long_url)? But like this:
’”.$var.”’

http://www.gidforums.com/t-965.html

Newboston's avatar

I don’t understand what you’re saying. I need to concatenate the two strings so I can send the $the_long_url to TinyURL for shortening. I tried putting apostraphes around the variable, but I’m still getting “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE in Line 6.”

nicobanks's avatar

I suggest you go to a web development website – you’ll get more answers and it’s more likely the answers you get will be good. I really like WDG.

Vincentt's avatar

I’ve got a feeling this should be really simple but unfortunately I can’t see it right away, and I’m not on a development machine to test it. The only thing I can see is that you aren’t using the right quotes, but that’s probably Fluther’s issue, right? To make sure that’s not the problem, here’s the code with correct quotes: http://pastebin.com/bK0QyJc6

Apart from that though, I would like to note that echo doesn’t need brackets around its arguments (and is recommended against as it’s not actually a function). And also, though I’m not sure of that since it’s been a while, that I believe you could only use file_get_contents() for local files, not files on another host.

You might want to use the Zend_Http_Client() class from the Zend Framework, which will also allow you to check response headers and the like to check whether the URL shortening request was successful.

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