PHP: Human-readable Random String

readable_random_string.php

<?php

/**
 * Generates human-readable string.
 *
 * @param string $length Desired length of random string.
 * 
 * retuen string Random string.
 */ 
function readable_random_string($length = 6)
{  
    $string = '';
    $vowels = array("a","e","i","o","u");  
    $consonants = array(
        'b', 'c', 'd', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 
        'n', 'p', 'r', 's', 't', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z'
    );  

    $max = $length / 2;
    for ($i = 1; $i <= $max; $i++)
    {
        $string .= $consonants[rand(0,19)];
        $string .= $vowels[rand(0,4)];
    }

    return $string;
}

Works great, thanks a lot for sharing.

The only change I made is that I removed the srand call since a self-contained function shouldn't change global state. Also by default PHP's random seed is already initialised to a good enough value.

Nice function, thanks

Nice! Works like charm.

Works NICE, thanks!

thanks my brother

This is great, but I'd definitely remove the srand() function. Called in a loop 100,000 times, with a character length of 8, without that srand(), there are on average ~50 collisions (i.e. 50 non-unique words generated), which is 0.05%. Adding it back in increases the number of collisions a hundred-fold - anywhere from 4800 to 5600 collisions per loop (or ~5%).

Without srand() it's still not perfectly unique, but it is a lot better.

I made an update on it. You can now also add words to it. And it adds a "-" between every word(Good to use for a pass phrase).
And I also fixed the bug where you couldn't do odd numbers. Now you can do a length of 1 or 3 or 5, etc. I tried to keep it the code as short as possible :).

Info on Param:
random_words($words, $length);
$words = Amount of words you want,
$length = Amount of letters you want.

It's by default, 1 word and 6 letters. Of course you can edit it ;)

function random_words($words = 1, $length = 6)
{  
    $string = '';
    for ($o=1; $o <= $words; $o++) 
    { 
        $vowels = array("a","e","i","o","u");  
        $consonants = array(
            'b', 'c', 'd', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 
            'n', 'p', 'r', 's', 't', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z'
        );  
    
        $word = '';
        for ($i = 1; $i <= $length; $i++)
        {
            $word .= $consonants[rand(0,19)];
            $word .= $vowels[rand(0,4)];
        }
        $string .= mb_substr($word, 0, $length);
        $string .= "-";
    }
    return mb_substr($string, 0, -1);
}

Thank you for this code. I added a caller function to randomize the length of the words and make it look like a "proper" sentence.

function readable_random_word($length = 6) {  
    $string = '';
    $vowels = array("a","e","i","o","u");  
    $consonants = array(
        'b', 'c', 'd', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 
        'n', 'p', 'r', 's', 't', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z'
    );  

    $max = $length / 2;
    for ($i = 1; $i <= $max; $i++)
    {
        $string .= $consonants[rand(0,19)];
        $string .= $vowels[rand(0,4)];
    }

    return $string;
}

function readable_random_sentence($length = 6) {
    $sentence = "";
    for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
        $word_length = rand(3, 8);  // get random length for the word
        $word = readable_random_word($word_length); // get the word
        $sentence .= $word . " "; // add the word to the sentence
    }

    return $sentence;
}