WordPress redirection based on URL

We’ve been working here on a URL shortener as a part of another project. To avoid the server redirect rules and so, we verify against the database whether a slug exists (is already entered in the DB) and if so, we get the URL and redirect to the page.

As a fan of the request filter, I’d go with this approach:

function dx_redirector_request_filter( $request ) {
    // check for request['name'], for instance for 
    // somewpsite.com/some-slug $request['name'] 
    // would be some-slug
 if( ! empty( $request['name'] ) ) {
            // verify against the database entries
            // redirect accordingly, this is a sample
            // if you pick somewpsite.com/yahoo.com or so
  wp_redirect( 'http://' . $request['name'], 301 );
  exit;
 }
 
 return $request;
}

add_filter( 'request', 'dx_redirector_request_filter' );