Generating a random hex color code with PHP

Question

I\'m working on a project where I need to generate an undefined number of random, hexadecimal color codes…how would I go about building such a function in PHP?

Answer 1

Valid hex colors can contain 0 to 9 and A to F so if we create a string with those characters and then shuffle it, we can grab the first 6 characters to create a random hex color code. An example is below!

code

echo '#' . substr(str_shuffle('ABCDEF0123456789'), 0, 6);

I tested this in a while loop and generated 10,000 unique colors.

code I used to generate 10,000 unique colors:

$colors = array();
while (true) {
   $color          = substr(str_shuffle('ABCDEF0123456789'), 0, 6);
   $colors[$color] = '#' . $color;
   if ( count($colors) == 10000 ) {
      echo implode(PHP_EOL, $colors);
      break;
   }
}

Which gave me these random colors as the result.

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outis pointed out that my first example couldn't generate hexadecimals such as '4488CC' so I created a function which would be able to generate hexadecimals like that.

code

function randomHex() {
   $chars = 'ABCDEF0123456789';
   $color = '#';
   for ( $i = 0; $i < 6; $i++ ) {
      $color .= $chars[rand(0, strlen($chars) - 1)];
   }
   return $color;
}

echo randomHex();

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The second example would be better to use because it can return a lot more different results than the first example, but if you aren't going to generate a lot of color codes then the first example would work just fine.