PHP function to generate v4 UUID

Question

So I\'ve been doing some digging around and I\'ve been trying to piece together a function that generates a valid v4 UUID in PHP. This is the closest I\'ve been able to come

Answer 1

Instead of breaking it down into individual fields, it's easier to generate a random block of data and change the individual byte positions. You should also use a better random number generator than mt_rand().

According to RFC 4122 - Section 4.4, you need to change these fields:

1. time_hi_and_version (bits 4-7 of 7th octet),
2. clock_seq_hi_and_reserved (bit 6 & 7 of 9th octet)

All of the other 122 bits should be sufficiently random.

The following approach generates 128 bits of random data using openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(), makes the permutations on the octets and then uses bin2hex() and vsprintf() to do the final formatting.

function guidv4($data)
{
    assert(strlen($data) == 16);

    $data[6] = chr(ord($data[6]) & 0x0f | 0x40); // set version to 0100
    $data[8] = chr(ord($data[8]) & 0x3f | 0x80); // set bits 6-7 to 10

    return vsprintf('%s%s-%s-%s-%s-%s%s%s', str_split(bin2hex($data), 4));
}

echo guidv4(openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(16));

With PHP 7, generating random byte sequences is even simpler using random_bytes():

function guidv4($data = null)
{
    $data = $data ?? random_bytes(16);
    // ...
}