[SOLVED] Generating completly random numbers

[smc]

Hello,

I'd like to make a random article id that can never re-occur. I thought about doing auto-increment in MySQL but I'd rather not give away exactly how many articles are in the DB, just seems unprofessional.

Thanks for any light you can shed on the issue!

Thanks

[HuggieBear]

How about make it auto-increment but start it on something random like 4932.

Nobody will be any the wiser then!

[code]ALTER TABLE table_name ADD column_name INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT=4932[/code]

That should do it.

Regards
Huggie

[boo_lolly]

how many characters do you want it to be? a quick/simple example would be:

[code]
<?php
$salt = "";
$rand = rand(0, 9);
$length = 10;

for($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++){
$salt .= $rand;
}

echo $salt;
?>
[/code]

untested.

[Jessica]

or use the current timestamp. That's what a legacy program I once had to maintain did.
Seriously, no one will care but you...

[JasonLewis]

i was going to suggest timestamp to. just use time() or microtime() except microtime() has a decimal in it, but that could be removed.

[HuggieBear]

[quote author=ProjectFear link=topic=124605.msg516537#msg516537 date=1170111884]
i was going to suggest timestamp to. just use time()
[/quote]

If you're going with timestamp, then just use mysql's now() function, don't worry about PHP's time() or microtime() functions at all.

INSERT INTO table_name (unique_id) VALUES (now())

Regards
Huggie

[smc]

I saw this somewhere, would this work?

md5(uniqid(rand()))

[Jessica]

That's kind of overkill. Plus md5 can collide.

[JasonLewis]

if your going to use md5 just insert the id as like, 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. Then when retriving it and using it md5() the variable. It would be easier to configure your DB in the future.