//gets the data from a URL function get_tiny_url($url) { $ch = curl_init(); $timeout = 5; curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,'http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url='.$url); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout); $data = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); return $data; } //test it out! $new_url = get_tiny_url('http://davidwalsh.name/php-imdb-information-grabber'); //returns http://tinyurl.com/65gqpp echo $new_url