Deal with URL length limits

[lucaspiller]

[mrshu]

How about gzipping the text, base64 encoding that and then on the other side doing precisely the opposite?

[lucaspiller]

That's exactly what happens at the moment, but we use raw deflate rather than the gzip file format.

[naugtur]

Outside Internet Explorer the limit for URL length is always above 100k (tested for a project 2 years ago and re-tested recently)

[nathgit]

how hard would it be to just incorporate a url shortener? There's a free shortener called tny.im. You can simply prefix the url you want to shorten with tny.im/ & hitting enter. Going to http://tny.im/https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly/issues/2 would create a short url for this url. You could easily create a bookmarklet to do it too.

[naugtur]

Wouldn't that literally defeat the purpose?

[nathgit]

I meant as an option as I way to share a long snippet of text. There are plenty of url shorteners, but not many that let you just share a long snippet of text. This is perfect for saving snippets, but the length of the url does make it more difficult to share.

[nathgit]

You can easily shorten a url with tny.im by saving javascript:void(window.open('https://tny.im/index.php?format=simple&action=shorturl&url='+escape(location.href))) as a bookmarklet.