Metamark APIs

All web services deserves an api or three. Please send feedback.

Please send examples on how to use the Metamark APIs from other languages (Ruby, PHP, Visual Basic, Objective C / Cocoa, AppleScript, ...)

If you use Perl, you might be interested in the WWW::Shorten package.

REST

The easiest interface to use is the rest interface. Simply send a GET or a POST request to http://metamark.net/api/rest/simple with a long_url parameter specifying the url you would like shortened. The long_url parameter should be url encoded.

The resulting page will have one line with the shortened url or in the case of errors (invalid url etc) an error message starting with ERROR:.

A way to get the long_url from a short_url is coming soon.

Perl example

use LWP::Simple qw($ua get);
use URI::Escape qw(uri_escape);

# optionally set the user agent
$ua->agent('MyMetamarkClient/0.1');

my $long_url = uri_escape('http://www.askbjoernhansen.com/?test=foo;bar=baz&kaz=taz');

# use $ua from LWP::Simple to do a post
my $short_url = $ua->post("http://metamark.net/api/rest/simple", { long_url => $long_url })->content;

## You could also use a get request; but using POST is more correct
# my $short_url = get("http://metamark.net/api/rest/simple?long_url=$long_url");

print "$short_url\n";

# Expand the long url from the short url
my $long_url = get("http://metamark.net/api/rest/simple?short_url=$short_url"), "\n";

print "$long_url\n";

Python example

from urllib import urlopen, urlencode
urlopen("http://metamark.net/api/rest/simple", 
urlencode({"long_url":"http://url.to.be.shortened/"})).read()

TCL example

    package require http 2.3
    # SHORTEN
    # shortens a long url [shorten "http://long.url"]
    #
    proc shorten {input} {
      set query [::http::geturl http://metamark.net/api/rest/simple?long_url=${input}]
      set url [lindex [split [::http::data $query] \n] 0]
      return $url
    }
    # LENGTHEN
    # returns the url that a shortened url points to [lengthen "http://xrl.us/foo"]
    #
    proc lengthen {input} {
      set query [::http::geturl http://metamark.net/api/rest/simple?short_url=${input}]
      set url [lindex [split [::http::data $query] \n] 0]
      return $url
    }