note 105151 deleted from function.rand by danbrown

Note Submitter: blee at misdivision dot com ---- This is the best function out there for getting a random string, numeric, symbols or a combination of any. If includes some checking to ensure return types are selected, however, you can specify the length and return types you want for your random value. Enjoy function get_random_value($length = 10, $types = "ans") { // Get the acceptable types $data["types"] = str_split($types); // Just a bit of checking to ensure the types requested are the types returned if (count($data["types"]) > 3) $data["types"] = "ans"; else if (empty($data["types"])) $data["types"] = "ans"; else foreach ($data["types"] as $type) if (!in_array($type, array("a", "n", "s"))) { $data["types"] = "ans"; break; } // Alpha values if (in_array("a", $data["types"])) $data["characters"] = array("A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","J","K","L","M", "N","P","Q","R","S","T","U","V","W","X","Y","Z", "a","b","c","d","e","f","g","h","i","j","k","l", "m","n","o","p","q","r","s","t","u","v","w","x", "y","z"); // Numeric values $data["numeric"] = array("1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9"); if (in_array("n", $data["types"])) if (!empty($data["characters"])) $data["characters"] = array_merge($data["characters"], $data["numeric"]); else $data["characters"] = $data["numeric"]; // Symbols values $data["symbols"] = array("&","*","(",")","#","@","=","!","-","="); if (in_array("s", $data["types"])) if (!empty($data["characters"])) $data["characters"] = array_merge($data["characters"], $data["symbols"]); else $data["characters"] = $data["symbols"]; // Declare key array to hold the values $keys = array(); // While count of keys is less than the requested length, continue for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) { $x = mt_rand(0, count($data["characters"])-1); if (!in_array($x, $keys) or $i >= count($data["characters"])) $keys[] = $x; } foreach($keys as $key) $random_string .= $data["characters"][$key]; return $random_string; }