Generating Unique IDs in PHP

This tutorial explains the technique to generate unique identifiers that are extremely difficult to predict.

We'll be using the following PHP functions to generate the unique identifier:

Use the code below to assign variable "id" the unique value. I'll discuss the code in more detail below.

$id = md5(uniqid(rand(), true));

After running the statement above PHP variable "id" will be assigned a unique 32 characters long value. Here is how it works:

The rand() function will generate a random number between 0 and getrandmax() (>= 32768). The uniqid function will take the random number as input and generate a unique identifier using the random value. After that we are taking the hash of the resultant unique identifier, which will give us a 32 characters (128 bits) long identifier.

A few sample runs gave me the following values:

da8b0432c9793b949d883a7ce4b5b038

c3ff02478937106b68733d9791586b54

116f84df8eb46a749060deee3daf53f9

Please feel free to use the comments form below if you have any questions or need more explanation on anything.

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Generating Unique IDs in PHP

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