Generating random string in PHP

Many times using PHP we developers require to generate a random string for obfuscation purpose. There could be lot of use-cases where this is applicable. Today, I will show you how to generate a random string of arbitrary length from the given character set.

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that we have to generate a random string out of characters from following set.

$character_set = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_";

Remember that value of character set depends on the desired complexity. Update the character set if you want string with more/less security.

I would enlist a function which actually generates a random string based on the given character set.

function randString($length, $character_set) { 
     $str = '';
     $count = strlen($character_set);
     while ($length--) {
         $str .= $character_set[mt_rand(0, $count-1)];
     }
     return $str;
 }
// Then you can generate the random string based on the given character set by calling following method
$random_string = randString(10, $character_set);