Generating Unique IDs in PHP

Tutorials > Web Development > PHP > Tips And Tricks > Generating Unique IDs in PHP

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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

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