How to check if two URL's lead to the same path? - node.js

Question

I'm building a URL Shortener, and I've decided to recyle the short ID's if possible to save space in my database. How can i check if 2 URL's lead to the same path?
For example, let's say a user generates a short URL for https://google.com/.
My app generates the following short id: jkU3
So if this user visits https://tiny.url/jkU3 my express server will redirect the visitor to https://google.com/.
This works like a charm, but know let's imagine another person visits https://tiny.url/ and generates a short URL for https://google.com. And another one comes and generates a short URL for https://www.google.com/, and another one comes and generates one for https://www.google.com. You get the point..
So far my app would have wasted 4 short ID's.
How can i prevent this from happening? Is there a regex for this?
This is the current code I have for generating short URL's:
app.post("/", (req: Request, res: Response) => {
const shortUrl: string = nanoid(4);
const destination: string = req.body.destination;
UrlSchema.create({
_id: mongoose.Types.ObjectId(),
origin: shortUrl,
destination: destination,
}).then(() => {
// Unique Id
res.json(shortUrl);
});
});

Answer 1

Before creating a new entry you can check work destination with
const existing = await UrlSchema.findOne({destination:req.body.destination});
if(!existing){
// create new
} else{
// return same
}
This way you will be creating destination if it does not exist already. You can remove tariling slash(/) if it exists to match URLs better,

Answer 2

You've listed four slightly different URLs:
https://www.google.com
https://google.com
https://www.google.com/
https://google.com/
None of these are technically the same https request, though it sounds like you want to assume that the / at the end is optional and thus does not make it a different target URL.
The last two are not guaranteed to be the same host as the first two. For google.com and www.google.com, they are the same host, but this is not guaranteed to be the case for all possible hosts.
If you want to assume that these four are all to the same host no matter what the domain is, then you just have to normalize the URL before you put it in your database and then before assigning a new shortened ID, you search the database for the normalized version of the URL.
In this case, you would remove the www. and remove any trailing slash to create the normalized version of the URL.
function normalizeUrl(url) {
// remove "www." if at first part of hostname
// remove trailing slash
return url.replace(/\/\/www\./, "//").replace(/\/$/, "");
}
Once you've normalized the URL, you search for the normalized URL in your database. If you find it, you use the existing shortener for it. If you don't find it, you add the normalized version to your database with a newly generated shortId.
Here's a demo:
function normalizeUrl(url) {
// remove "www." if at first part of hostname
// remove trailing slash
return url.replace(/\/\/www\./i, "//").replace(/\/$/, "");
}
const testUrls = [
"https://www.google.com",
"https://www.google.com/",
"https://google.com",
"https://google.com/",
];
for (const url of testUrls) {
console.log(normalizeUrl(url));
}
FYI, since hostnames in DNS are not case sensitive, you may also want to force the hostname to lower case to normalize it. Path names or query parameters could be case sensitive (sometimes they are and sometime they are not).
To include the host case sensitivity normalization, you could use this:
function normalizeUrl(url) {
// remove "www." if at first part of hostname
// remove trailing slash
// lowercase host name
return newUrl = url.replace(/\/\/www\./i, "//").replace(/\/$/, "").replace(/\/\/([^/]+)/, function(match, p1) {
// console.log(match, p1);
return "//" + p1.toLowerCase();
});
}
const testUrls = [
"https://www.google.com",
"https://www.google.com/",
"https://google.com",
"https://google.com/",
"https://WWW.google.com",
"https://www.Google.com/",
"https://GOOGLE.com",
"https://google.COM/",
"https://www.Google.com/xxx", // this should be unique
"https://google.COM/XXX", // this should be unique
];
for (const url of testUrls) {
console.log(normalizeUrl(url));
}