wp_generate_uuid4(): string

User Contributed Notes

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   Philipp Stracker 3 years ago

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   Sample result: 11223344-5566-7788-99AA-BBCCDDEEFF00

   A UUID represents a 128-bit value (16 bytes): It contains four 4-byte digits that are represented in hex notation, and are segmented by 4 “-” symbols. The total length is 36 characters.

   The “-” symbols appear after byte 4, byte 6, byte 8 and after byte 10.

   Because it’s a hex-value, a UUID should be treated in a case-insensitive manner:
   11223344-5566-7788-99AA-BBCCDDEEFF00 is identical to 11223344-5566-7788-99aa-bbccddeeff00

   This function always returns a lower-case string.

   To get a 32-character string (same as MD5) you could use:

   <?php
   $uuid36 = wp_generate_uuid4();             // a938e855-483e-48c7-9b98-f41e90511f77
   $uuid32 = str_replace( '-', '', $uuid36 ); // a938e855483e48c79b98f41e90511f77
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   thanasisxan 2 years ago

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   It should be noted that using this function to generate uuid’s WILL lead to collisions by creating duplicates, I found out not the fun way.

   The function mt_rand() used will always produce the same sequence of random numbers given the same seed. So every time a seed is repeated, the same exact UUID is generated.

   To get around this, you would need to seed it using something else for example:

   mt_srand( crc32( serialize( array( microtime( true ), 'USER_IP', 'ETC' ) ) ) );