What's wrong with this simple PHP script?

Do you need a concatenation operator (.) between your string and the variable name ($the_long_url)? But like this:
’”.$var.”’

http://www.gidforums.com/t-965.html

I don’t understand what you’re saying. I need to concatenate the two strings so I can send the $the_long_url to TinyURL for shortening. I tried putting apostraphes around the variable, but I’m still getting “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE in Line 6.”

I suggest you go to a web development website – you’ll get more answers and it’s more likely the answers you get will be good. I really like WDG.

I’ve got a feeling this should be really simple but unfortunately I can’t see it right away, and I’m not on a development machine to test it. The only thing I can see is that you aren’t using the right quotes, but that’s probably Fluther’s issue, right? To make sure that’s not the problem, here’s the code with correct quotes: http://pastebin.com/bK0QyJc6

Apart from that though, I would like to note that echo doesn’t need brackets around its arguments (and is recommended against as it’s not actually a function). And also, though I’m not sure of that since it’s been a while, that I believe you could only use file_get_contents() for local files, not files on another host.

You might want to use the Zend_Http_Client() class from the Zend Framework, which will also allow you to check response headers and the like to check whether the URL shortening request was successful.