Making a short URL similar to TinyURL.com

Question

I\'m building a new web app that has a requirement to generate an internal short URL to be used in the future for users to easily get back to a specific page which has a ver

Answer 1

They use base 36 encoding, and you can make your app more robust by using base 64.

Here's what I'd try in Python (I do see your language tags, forgive me):

#!/usr/bin/python

from base64 import b64encode
from hashlib import sha1

for i in range(5):
    salted_int = "%s" % i
    print b64encode(sha1(salted_int).hexdigest())[:6]

Outputs:

NTUwMz
ZTVmZD
OGEzNm
Njc2MT
YzVkNj

So you can autoincrement an integer and feed it to some kind of function like this, and end up with a good chance of a random group of strings. See also my answer to this question. Some base64 implementations have the potential to emit a slash / or a plus sign +, and therefore you should keep an eye out for these in your implementation as they're dangerous in URLs.

Hashes are really flexible and prevent your users from guessing the next URL (if this is important to you).