Developer

A unique feature of QuicK Link Chopper is the ability to call our API from your website and/or app to embed shortened links on the fly.

Registering for an API Key

An API key is required for requests to be processed by the system, simply create an account and sign up for a paid option from just £9.99 per year (under 20p per week). Once a user registers, an API key is automatically generated for this user. The API key must attached to request via the api parameter (see full example below).

Sending a request for shortening a URL

To send a request, the user must use the following format where the variables api and url are required. To request a custom alias, simply add &custom= at the end (although we advise users to omit the custom alias request to avoid duplicate rejection errors.

  GET http://qk.lc/short/api?api=APIKEY&url=THELONGURLTOBESHORTENED&custom=CUSTOMALIAS

Server response

The response is encoded in JSON format (default). This is done to facilitate cross-language usage. The first element of the response will always tell if an error has occurred (error: 1) or not (error: 0). The second element will change with respect to the first element. If there is an error, the second element will be named “msg”. which contains the source of error, otherwise it will be named “short” which contains the short URL. (See below for an example)

// No errors
{
  "error":0,
  "short":"http:\/\/qk.lc\/short\/DkZOb"
}
// An error has occurred
{
  "error":1,
  "msg":"Please enter a valid email"
}

Using plain text format

You can now request the response to be in plain text by just adding &format=text at the end of your request. This will return just http://qk.lc/short/DkZOb instead of the JSON response. Note that if an error occurs, it will not output anything.

Using the API in PHP

To use the API in your PHP application, you have to send a GET request through file_get_contents or cURL: Both are reliable methods. You can see a sample code below using file_get_contents.

<?php
  // Using JSON Response
  $api_url="http://qk.lc/short/api?api=APIKEY&url=THELONGURLTOBESHORTENED&custom=CUSTOMALIAS";
  $res= @json_decode(file_get_contents($api_url),TRUE);
  if($res["error"]){
    echo $res["msg"];
  }else{
    echo $res["short"];
  }

  // Using Plain Text Response
  $api_url="http://qk.lc/short/api?api=APIKEY&url=THELONGURLTOBESHORTENED&custom=CUSTOMALIAS&format=text";
  $res= @file_get_contents($api_url);
  if($res){
    echo $res;
  }
?>