When creating web apps, there’s often a need to generate a random password for your users. There are a number of ways to do this, but in needing to do it recently I came up with this very simple function that will generate a password (or other random string) of whatever length you wish. It’s particularly useful when generating passwords for users that they will then change in the future. It uses PHP’s handy str_shuffle()
function:
The only shortcoming of this method will come in when you want to generate a password that is longer than $chars
, but this is rather unlikely I would think. Also, the fact that it will only ever use each character a maximum of one time means that it is more susceptible to a brute force attack (whether that’s a problem or not depends on how paranoid you are…).
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