Generate random string from 4 to 8 characters in PHP

Question

Hi guys!!

I need to generate a string using PHP, it need to be unique and need to be from 4 to 8 characters (the value of a variable).

I thought I can use crc32 hash but I can't decide how many characters, but sure it will be unique. In the other hand only create a "password generator" will generate duplicated string and checking the value in the table for each string will take a while.

How can I do that?

Thanks!

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Maybe I can use that :

  function unique_id(){
  $better_token = md5(uniqid(rand(), true));
  $unique_code = substr($better_token, 16);
  $uniqueid = $unique_code;
  return $uniqueid;
  }

  $id = unique_id();

Changing to :

  function unique_id($l = 8){
  $better_token = md5(uniqid(rand(), true));
      $rem = strlen($better_token)-$l;
  $unique_code = substr($better_token, 0, -$rem);
  $uniqueid = $unique_code;
  return $uniqueid;
  }

  echo unique_id(4);

Do you think I'll get unique string each time for a goood while?

Answer 1

The problem with randomness is that you can never be sure of anything. There is a small chance you could get one number this time and the same number the next. That said, you would want to make the string as long as possible to reduce that probability. As an example of how long such numbers can be, GUIDs (globally unique identifiers) are 16 bytes long.

In theory, four hex characters (16 bits) give only 16^4 = 65536 possibilities, while eight hex characters (32 bits) give 16^8 = 4294967296. You, however, need to consider how likely it is for any two hashes to collide (the "birthday problem"). Wikipedia has a good table on how likely such a collision is. In short, four hex characters are definitely not sufficient, and eight might not be.

You may want to consider using Base64 encoding rather than hex digits; that way, you can fit 48 bits in rather than just 32 bits.

Eight bytes is 8 * 8 = 64 bits.

Answer 2

In short, I think you'll get a pretty good random value. There's always the chance of a collision but you've done everything you can to get a random value. uniqid() returns a random value based on the current time in microseconds. Specifying rand() (mt_rand() would be better) and the second argument as true to uniqid() should make the value even more unique. Hashing the value using md5() should also make it pretty unique as even a small difference in two random values generated should be magnified by the hashing function. idealmachine is correct in that a longer value is less likely to have a collision than a shorter one.

Your function could also be shorter since md5() will always return a 32 character long string. Try this:

function unique_id($l = 8) {
    return substr(md5(uniqid(mt_rand(), true)), 0, $l);
}