sending a long link in an email using PHP

I am trying to implement a website which among other things, let users invite other users to specific pages. Unfortunately the link address of those pages are fairly long, and often cross the 70 characters limit开发者_如何学C. SO when I add them to the mail, even if I start a new line before the link, still the link address is cut halfway, and then the email client (gmail, for example) assumes the link ends at the end of the line. SO when the user clicks on the link, they experience it as broken.

I am coding all this in PHP, but the problem seem to be general.

What is the standard solution to this problem?

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Place the URL in <> brackets. Most mail clients will parse the URL correctly and make it clickable, even when wrapped.

<http://www.somereallylongdomain.com/somereallylongdirectory/somereallylongfilename.html>

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You could use a URL shortener to redirect to the longer links. Bit.ly has an API with which your code can interface for this purpose.

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I don't know if there are better solutions, but you can implement a url shortener with http://yourls.org/ or with other tools...

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Create your own URL shortening solution. There are several ways you can go, depending on the complexity of your requirements:

• if you're using only a few selected urls which are always repeating, use apache rewrite
• if the url is user specific or changes in other ways from case to case, use a database table that stores a short url and the original url
• if you don't want or can't implement your own solution, use an existing url shortening service via an API, but make sure not to expose security relevant information