TalkPHP - View Single Post - need advice for creating personalized urls

webosb · 02-25-2008, 04:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wildhoney

I've just wrote us a nice function which generates identifiers just like YouTube

! Not just limited to the hexadecimal range of 0 to F.

php Code:

function getIdentifier($iLength, $bUseUpper = true, $bUseLower = true, $bUseNumber = true)
{
    $szId = '';
    $aChars = array();
    
    if($bUseUpper)  $aChars[] = range(65, 90);
    if($bUseLower)  $aChars[] = range(97, 122);
    if($bUseNumber) $aChars[] = range(48, 57);
    
    $iCount = count($aChars);
    
    if($iCount == 0)
    {
        return null;
    }
    
    for($iIndex = 0; $iIndex < $iLength; $iIndex++)
    {
        $iChannel = rand(0, $iCount - 1);
        $szId .= chr($aChars[$iChannel][rand(0, count($aChars[$iChannel]) - 1)]);
    }
    
    return $szId;
}

echo 'ID = ' . getIdentifier(6);

You can even specify which types to include using the 3 arguments after the identifier length. All of which are set to true by default. You'll of course want to add your own checker to see if the returned identifier is unique. I recommend sticking in a do while loop for that -- outside of the function itself.

so correct me if i'm wrong, it should work something like this:

(im just using dupecheckid() function as an example - but the function would run a query like SELECT * FROM table WHERE uid = $id)

$id = getIdentifier(6);
if(dupecheckid($id)){
//identical id found in database
$id = getIdentifier(6);
}else{
//continue doing what it is doing
}