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Comment by google234123 | Hacker News Reader

> Disclaimer: Since there is a maximum letter count to a URL, there is a slight chance your resulting URL will be too long to use. No worries, try running it through a site like bit.ly and then paste that one over here. Every resulting URL ends up having a minimum number of characters, so your URL will still be plenty long!

This seems like something you can trivially solve yourself. Is there any good reason why you push this issue on the user?

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I think it is because it is not implemented the way (I imagine) URL shorteners to be implemented with a database back-end to map the short tokens to the actual sites. Instead it just performs a reversible transform on the URL. This way the site is really just a static website (and I imagine a lot cheaper for the owner who can't be interested in laying out a lot of money for this).

But this is just a lot of speculation on my part which means I'm probably wrong about at least one aspect.

There isn't really "a" maximum count. There's a variety of enforced limits. If the standard(s) even set an official one, it's not something a lot of things pay attention to. You also can encounter problems with things like command lines enforcing their own limits, making a URL that your browser may or may not be happy with not be something you can directly curl or wget.

I never found an RFC documenting an URL size limit.

Since there really isn't any set maximum, I didn't have anything to base it off of. I might actually remove that section since I've seen 24k-long URLs work perfectly fine. Also I would have to do some reworking to have that happen since the url lengthening is all browser-side right now.

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