PHP code for generating decent-looking coupon codes (mix of letters and numbers)

Question

For an ecommerce site I want to generate a random coupon code that looks better than a randomly generated value. It should be a readable coupon code, all in uppercase with n

Answer 1

$length = 9;
$code   = (strtoupper(substr(md5(time()), 0, $length)));

Answer 2

If there are no security requirements for these, then you don't really need randomly generated codes. I would just use incremental IDs, such as those generated by whatever RDBMS you use. Optionally, if you have different types of coupons, you could prefix the codes with something, e.g.:

CX00019 QZ0001C
CX0001A QZ0001D
CX0001B QZ0001E

Alternately, you could even use dictionary words in the coupon, as such coupon codes are easier to remember and faster for users to type. Companies like Dreamhost use these for their promo codes, e.g.:

Promo60
NoSetupFee
YELLOWGORILLA82

Some of these are obviously human-created (which you might want to have the option of), but they can also be generated using a dictionary list. But even if they are randomly-generated nonsense phrases, the fact that the characters follow a logical pattern still makes it much more user-friendly than something like R7QZ8A92F1. So I would strongly advise against using the latter type of coupon codes just on the basis that they "look cool". Your customers will thank you.

Answer 3

Why don't keep it simple?

<?php
    echo strtoupper(uniqid());
?>

Always returns 13 character long uppercased random code.

Answer 4

$chars = "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";
$res = "";
for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) {
    $res .= $chars[mt_rand(0, strlen($chars)-1)];
}

You can optimize this by preallocating the $res string and caching the result of strlen($chars)-1. This is left as an exercise to the reader, since probably you won't be generating thousands of coupons per second.

Answer 5

$size = 12;

$string = strtoupper(substr(md5(time().rand(10000,99999)), 0, $size));

Answer 6

You can use the coupon code generator PHP class file to generate N number of coupons and its customizable, with various options of adding own mask with own prefix and suffix. Simple PHP coupon code generator

Example: coupon::generate(8); // J5BST6NQ