iPhone Coding Recipe – Shortening URLs
I had some a to shorten URLs for an in-application Twitter client I’m working on and thought I would share my simple solution with you guys.
It’s actually pretty straight forward and can be done in 1 line of code. I have broken it up into several for clarity.
NSString *url = @"http://brandontreb.com"; NSString *apiEndpoint = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://api.tr.im/v1/trim_simple?url=%@",url]; NSString *shortURL = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:apiEndpoint] encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding error:nil]; NSLog(@"Long: %@ - Short: %@",url,shortURL); // Outputs Long: http://brandontreb.com - Short: http://tr.im/MRDd
Pretty easy huh?
The magic here is in a method that Apple gave us as part of NSString. This method is called stringWithContentsOfURL. It will easily allow you to grab the text of any remote source.
I have used Tr.im as an example here because their service is very easy to use and has little overhead. I would have used bit.ly but they return a JSON string which would then have to be parsed. Tr.im’s trim_simple service simply outputs the string of the shortened URL.
Sure Twitter may shorten links for you automatically, but what if you want to use a custom service? Or,…wait for it… use it for something other than Twitter (please post in the comments if you do. I would love to hear some other uses 
)
Questions? Comments? Complaints?
Happy iCoding