| By
Amrit Hallan
Sometimes you need to generate unique random numbers if you want to
assign IDs to your members or assign unique values to your shopping cart
items. Here I'm just citing to reason whereas it depends on you for what
purpose you'd like to generate a random number in your PHP scripts. I have
written a small function that takes one argument. This argument tells the
function how many digits you want in the generated number.
For a live example of the article, go to
http://www.aboutwebdesigning.com/2005/09/29/generate-a-random-number-using-php
First, here's the function:
function random_num($n=5)
{
return rand(0, pow(10, $n));
}
If you send no argument to the random_num() function, it generates a 5-digit
random number. This is how we use it:
echo random_num(); gave 96161 when tested
and
echo random_num(7); gave 5983582 when tested
This function uses the PHP math function pow() to get the number of
digits we want. The function pow() calculates the power of a number like say
10 raised to the power 5. In math we write it like 10 Exp 5. Basically, the
real rand() function takes 2 arguments: the lower limit and the upper limit.
So if you want to generate a random number that should be greater than 107
and less than 5067, you might get something like:
echo rand(107, 5067); gave 3456 when
tested
Since we normally don't need the upper limits and the lower limits, I've
elucidated a generic function that gives you a random number of specific
number of digits.
About the Author
Amrit Hallan is a freelance copywriter, and a website content writer. He
also dabbles with PHP and HTML. For more tips and tricks in PHP,
JavaScripting, XML, CSS designing and HTML, visit his blog at
http://www.aboutwebdesigning.com
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/
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