Often I find that generating a random string can be tedious, there seem to be so many ways to do this.

I wrote this simple function to do the work, and it can be easily modified.

<?php
/*
 * Create a random string
 * @author	XEWeb <>
 * @param $length the length of the string to create
 * @return $str the string
 */
function randomString($length = 6) {
	$str = "";
	$characters = array_merge(range('A','Z'), range('a','z'), range('0','9'));
	$max = count($characters) - 1;
	for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
		$rand = mt_rand(0, $max);
		$str .= $characters[$rand];
	}
	return $str;
}

You can remove any of the ranges in $characters (for example if you didn't want uppercase letters delete the range('A','Z')) or put in your own array of characters.