Be careful when setting the 'strong' parameter to true.
If you system doesn't have enough entropy your script will block which can cause timeouts in other parts of your code.
In my case, the most serious symptom was my script blocking when trying to read from /dev/random and causing a 'MySQL has gone away' error.
Hopefully this saves someone the trouble when deciding to use /dev/random entropy
OAuthProvider::generateToken
(PECL OAuth >= 1.0.0)
OAuthProvider::generateToken — Generate a random token
Description
Generates a string of pseudo-random bytes.
Parameters
-
size -
The desired token length, in terms of bytes.
-
strong -
Setting to
truemeans/dev/randomwill be used for entropy, as otherwise the non-blocking/dev/urandomis used. This parameter is ignored on Windows.
Return Values
The generated token, as a string of bytes.
Errors/Exceptions
If the strong parameter is true, then an
E_WARNING level error will be emitted when the
fallback rand() implementation is used to fill
the remaining random bytes (e.g., when not enough random data was found,
initially).
Examples
Example #1 OAuthProvider::generateToken() example
<?php
$p = new OAuthProvider();
$t = $p->generateToken(4);
echo strlen($t), PHP_EOL;
echo bin2hex($t), PHP_EOL;
?>The above example will output something similar to:
4 b6a82c27
Notes
Note:
When not enough random data is available to the system, this function will fill the remaining random bytes using the internal PHP rand() implementation.
See Also
- openssl_random_pseudo_bytes() - Generate a pseudo-random string of bytes
- mcrypt_create_iv() - Creates an initialization vector (IV) from a random source
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User Contributed Notes 1 note
carlosouza at me dot com ¶
12 years ago
