Shorten a Neuroglancer URL using the Janelia FlyEM link shortener

Usage

flyem_shorten_url(
  url,
  filename = NA_character_,
  title = NA_character_,
  method = c("default", "md5", "ms"),
  ...
)

flyem_expand_url(url, return = c("url", "json", "parsed"), ...)

Arguments

url: One or more URLs to shorten or expand
filename: An optional filename to use in the shortened URL. You can also provide a URL in which case the terminal filename will be extracted.
title: An optional title for the webpage
method: An optional scheme for automatic naming of shortened URLs. See details.
...: Additional arguments passed to httr::POST
return: When expanding, whether to return a long URL, an R list or a JSON text fragment.

Value

For flyem_shorten_url a character vector containing a short URL. For flyem_expand_url a character vector or list depending on the return argument. If the input url argument is a named vector of length>1, then the output will also be named.

Details

The default filename for these fragments consists of the date and time to the nearest second. For this reason you will have trouble generating many of these links in quick succession. To overcome this limitation, you can specify your own filename. We also provide two convenience naming methods: .

md5 An md5 hash of the URL+title e.g. "9a35fc580f710f3a62b2809a10fe106d.json" .
ms Timestamp to the nearest millisecond e.g. "1708773000.001.json"

Note that this is an open endpoint so there are two potential security concerns. URLs named by date/time can potentially be guessed and inspected. Known URLs can be overwritten to point to a new location. If these are concerns then the MD5 hash format has some advantages.

see FlyEM CNS Slack for more details.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# this reads the URL from the clipboard
su=flyem_shorten_url(clipr::read_clip())
lu=flyem_expand_url(su)
fafbseg::ngl_decode_scene(lu)
# these give you the same result
browseURL(su)
browseURL(lu)

# Generate many unique short URLs based on an MD5 hash of the long URL
sus=flyem_shorten_url("<Long URLs>", method='md5')
} # }