Using Sina Short URL API with PHP to Generate and Expand Short Links

Short URLs are compact web addresses that redirect to longer original links; they are commonly created using server‑side scripts such as PHP.

Sina provides an API that can transform a long URL into a short one of the form t.cn/xxx . Two endpoint formats are available:

http://api.t.sina.com.cn/short_url/shorten.json   (JSON response)
http://api.t.sina.com.cn/short_url/shorten.xml    (XML response)

The required request parameters are:

source : the AppKey assigned when you create a Sina application.

url_long : the URL to be shortened (URL‑encoded). Up to 20 URLs can be submitted, each as a separate url_long parameter.

Below is a simple PHP example that builds the request URL, fetches the response, and outputs the result:

<?php
$api = 'http://api.t.sina.com.cn/short_url/shorten.json'; // JSON endpoint
$source = 'YOUR_APPKEY';
$url_long = 'https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a21wu.241046-us.9629632455.7.193eb6cbbC9gFg&id=585958323801';
$request_url = sprintf($api.'?source=%s&url_long=%s', $source, $url_long);
$data = file_get_contents($request_url);
echo $data;
?>

A typical JSON response looks like this:

[
{
"url_short": "http:\/\/t.cn\/Rki0twp",
"url_long": "http:\/\/detail.tmall.com\/item.htm?spm=a21wu.241046-us.9629632455.7.193eb6cbbC9gFg&id=585958323801",
"type": 0
}
]

The same information can be retrieved in XML format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urls>
<url>
<url_short>http://t.cn/Rki0twp</url_short>
<url_long>https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a21wu.241046-us.9629632455.7.193eb6cbbC9gFg&id=585958323801</url_long>
<type>0</type>
</url>
</urls>

The generated short link in the example is http://t.cn/Rki0twp , which redirects to the original Taobao product page.

A complete reusable PHP class for short‑URL operations is provided below:

class ShortUrl {
// Sina AppKey
const APPKEY = 'xxxxxxxx'; // replace with your AppKey
private static function CURLQueryString($url) {
$addHead = array("Content-type: application/json");
$curl_obj = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_obj, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curl_obj, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $addHead);
curl_setopt($curl_obj, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($curl_obj, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_obj, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 8);
$result = curl_exec($curl_obj);
curl_close($curl_obj);
return $result;
}
private static function doWithResult($result, $field) {
$result = json_decode($result, true);
return isset($result[0][$field]) ? $result[0][$field] : '';
}
public static function getShort($url) {
$url = 'http://api.t.sina.com.cn/short_url/shorten.json?source=' . self::APPKEY . '&url_long=' . $url;
$result = self::CURLQueryString($url);
return self::doWithResult($result, 'url_short');
}
public static function getLong($url) {
$url = 'http://api.t.sina.com.cn/short_url/expand.json?source=' . self::APPKEY . '&url_short=' . $url;
$result = self::CURLQueryString($url);
return self::doWithResult($result, 'url_long');
}
}