php function to generate numbers and letters [closed] - php

Question

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question appears to be off-topic because it lacks sufficient information to diagnose the problem. Describe your problem in more detail or include a minimal example in the question itself.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
So I need to create a function that will produce the following types of combinations:
Option #1: ### (can/needs to be 3 numbers)
Option #2: #*# (number, letter, number)
Option #3: #** (number, letter, letter)
Option #4: **# (letter, letter, number)
Option #5: *## (letter, number, number)
Option #6: * (letter, letter, letter)
The reason for this is to parse those possibilities against the FAA website to find the available codes. So if I can get the function created to create those possibilities, I can store them in a database and then write my function to loop over those, and push them to a curl method to scrape the response. I'm code blocked on how to create this function though
As an example:
Field 1: 123 - Field 2: 1B1 - Field 3: T8C

Answer 1

A possible way to do this is to simply add all characters to an array, loop over it 3x and just add em all together. Like so:
function return_all_possible_combos() {
$chars = array();
for($i=48;$i<=57;$i++) {
$chars[] = chr($i); // adds the characters 0-9 to the $chars array (48-57 are the positions of 0-9 in the ASCII table
}
for($i=65;$i<=90;$i++) {
$chars[] = chr($i); // adds the characters 0-9 to the $chars array (65-90 are the positions of A-Z in the ASCII table
}
// $chars now holds all values 0-9 and A-Z
$possible_values = array();
foreach($chars as $k=>$first_char) {
foreach($chars as $l=>$second_char) {
foreach($chars as $m=>$third_char) {
$possible_values[] = $first_char . $second_char . $third_char;
}
}
}
return $possible_values;
}

Answer 2

Your problem is quite trivial, you might use something like this:
<?
function randomString($format) {
$format = str_split($format);
$chars = str_split("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ");
$res = "";
foreach ($format as $f) {
if ($f=="#") $res .= rand(0,9);
else $res .= $chars[array_rand($chars)];
}
return $res;
}
?>
This basically returns random string the way you need it. For example:
<?
echo randomString("##**");
?>
Will return two numbers followed by two characters.
I wrote this without testing, so it might need a little tweaking, and I usually do not prefer writing code for other people problems, but this seemed like interesting, albeit trivial problem.
Let me know if this is what you need.