[thelist] srand in php
Jay Greenspan
jay at trans-city.com
Tue Oct 23 17:04:17 CDT 2001
Interesting.
If you run this enough times you will see a 2 as the primary digit, but
never a 3 or anything larger. That's because mt_rand returns an integer,
and the maximum value of an integer is 2147483647.
I can think of a couple of hacky ways to get a random number that's 10
digits, but I'd like to see what other list members will come up with.
Would a 10 character string do the trick? Or does it have to be digits?
Do they have to be random or simply unique? Will 9 digits do work?
-j
On Tuesday, October 23, 2001, at 02:56 PM, noah wrote:
> I'm generating a random number using php - I found the information
> about how to do it in the php manual and at phpbuilder. The random
> number is 10 digits long, and is generated like this:
>
> mt_srand((double)microtime()*1000000);
> $key = mt_rand(1000000000,9999999999);
>
> I'm just wondering if anyone can offer any insight on why the random
> number always begins with 1. The next nine digits appear to be random,
> but the 40 times or so that I've run this, the first digit has always
> been 1.
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