Random generator returning endless duplicates - php

Question

I am trying to create a random string which will be used as a short reference number. I have spent the last couple of days trying to get this to work but it seems to get to around 32766 records and then it continues with endless duplicates. I need at minimum 200,000 variations.
The code below is a very simple mockup to explain what happens. The code should be syntaxed according to 1a-x1y2z (example) which should give a lot more results than 32k
I have a feeling it may be related to memory but not sure. Any ideas?
<?php
function createReference() {
$num = rand(1, 9);
$alpha = substr(str_shuffle("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"), 0, 1);
$char = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';
$charLength = strlen($char);
$rand = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < 6; $i++) {
$rand .= $char[rand(0, $charLength - 1)];
}
return $num . $alpha . "-" . $rand;
}
$codes = [];
for ($i = 1; $i <= 200000; $i++) {
$code = createReference();
while (in_array($code, $codes) == true) {
echo 'Duplicate: ' . $code . '<br />';
$code = createReference();
}
$codes[] = $code;
echo $i . ": " . $code . "<br />";
}
exit;
?>
UPDATE
So I am beginning to wonder if this is not something with our WAMP setup (Bitnami) as our local machine gets to exactly 1024 records before it starts duplicating. By removing 1 character from the string above (instead of 6 in the for loop I make it 5) it gets to exactly 32768 records.
I uploaded the script to our centos server and had no duplicates.
What in our enviroment could cause such a behaviour?

Answer 1

The code looks overly complex to me. Let's assume for the moment you really want to create n unique strings each based on a single random value (rand/mt_rand/something between INT_MIN,INT_MAX).
You can start by decoupling the generation of the random values from the encoding (there seems to be nothing in the code that makes a string dependant on any previous state - excpt for the uniqueness). Comparing integers is quite a bit faster than comparing arbitrary strings.
mt_rand() returns anything between INT_MIN and INT_MAX, using 32bit integers (could be 64bit as well, depends on how php has been compiled) that gives ~232 elements. You want to pick 200k, let's make it 400k, that's ~ a 1/10000 of the value range. It's therefore reasonable to assume everything goes well with the uniqueness...and then check at a later time. and add more values if a collision occured. Again much faster than checking in_array in each iteration of the loop.
Once you have enough values, you can encode/convert them to a format you wish. I don't know whether the <digit><character>-<something> format is mandatory but assume it is not -> base_convert()
<?php
function unqiueRandomValues($n) {
$values = array();
while( count($values) < $n ) {
for($i=count($values);$i<$n; $i++) {
$values[] = mt_rand();
}
$values = array_unique($values);
}
return $values;
}
function createReferences($n) {
return array_map(
function($e) {
return base_convert($e, 10, 36);
},
unqiueRandomValues($n)
);
}
$start = microtime(true);
$references = createReferences(400000);
$end = microtime(true);
echo count($references), ' ', count(array_unique($references)), ' ', $end-$start, ' ', $references[0];
prints e.g. 400000 400000 3.3981630802155 f3plox on my i7-4770. (The $end-$start part is constantly between 3.2 and 3.4)
Using base_convert() there can be strings like li10, which can be quite annoying to decipher if you have to manually type the string.