Generating (pseudo)random alpha-numeric strings

First make a string with all your possible characters:

 $characters = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789';

You could also use range() to do this more quickly.

Then, in a loop, choose a random number and use it as the index to the $characters string to get a random character, and append it to your string:

 $string = '';
 $max = strlen($characters) - 1;
 for ($i = 0; $i < $random_string_length; $i++) {
      $string .= $characters[mt_rand(0, $max)];
 }

$random_string_length is the length of the random string.

Use the ASCII table to pick a range of letters, where the: $range_start , $range_end is a value from the decimal column in the ASCII table.

I find that this method is nicer compared to the method described where the range of characters is specifically defined within another string.

// range is numbers (48) through capital and lower case letters (122)
$range_start = 48;
$range_end   = 122;
$random_string = "";
$random_string_length = 10;

for ($i = 0; $i < $random_string_length; $i++) {
  $ascii_no = round( mt_rand( $range_start , $range_end ) ); // generates a number within the range
  // finds the character represented by $ascii_no and adds it to the random string
  // study **chr** function for a better understanding
  $random_string .= chr( $ascii_no );
}

echo $random_string;

See More:

• chr function
• mt_rand function

Simple guys .... but remember each byte is random between 0 and 255 which for a random string will be fine. Also remember you'll have two characters to represent each byte.

$str = bin2hex(random_bytes(32));  // 64 character string returned

You can use the following code. It is similar to existing functions except that you can force special character count:

function random_string() {
    // 8 characters: 7 lower-case alphabets and 1 digit
    $character_sets = [
        ["count" => 7, "characters" => "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"],
        ["count" => 1, "characters" => "0123456789"]
    ];
    $temp_array = array();
    foreach ($character_sets as $character_set) {
        for ($i = 0; $i < $character_set["count"]; $i++) {
            $random = random_int(0, strlen($character_set["characters"]) - 1);
            $temp_array[] = $character_set["characters"][$random];
        }
    }
    shuffle($temp_array);
    return implode("", $temp_array);
}

First list the desired characters

$chars = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';

Use the str_shuffle($string) function. This function will provide you a randomly shuffled string.

$alpha=substr(str_shuffle($chars), 0, 50);

50 is the Length of string.

The modern way to do that with type hint / rand_int for real randomeness

function random_string(int $size): string
{
    $characters = array_merge(
        range(0, 9),
        range('A', 'Z')
    );

    $string = '';
    $max = count($characters) - 1;
    for ($i = 0; $i < $size; $i++) {
        $string .= $characters[random_int(0, $max)];
    }

    return $string;
}

public function randomString($length = 8)
{
    $characters = implode([
        'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPORRQSTUWVXYZ',
        'abcdefghijklmnoprqstuwvxyz',
        '0123456789',
        //'!@#$%^&*?'
    ]);

    $charactersLength = strlen($characters) - 1;
    $string           = '';

    while ($length) {
        $string .= $characters[mt_rand(0, $charactersLength)];
        --$length;
    }

    return $string;
}