Updated Random String generator CakePHP component

Gyuri — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:38:42 +0000

Here is a new component that will generate random strings for you. You can pass it a set of characters to pick from and how long your random string should be. I use it to generate passwords but you can do just about anything with it.

To use it, create a file called random_helper.php in app/controllers/components and copy the following code.


class RandomHelperComponent extends Object {
 
/**
 * Random string generator function
 *
 * This function will randomly generate a password from a given set of characters
 *
 * @param int = 8, length of the password you want to generate
 * @param string = 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz all possible values
 * @return string, the password
 */     
	function generateRandomString ($length = 8, $possible = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz') {
		// initialize variables
		$password = "";
		$i = 0;
 
		// add random characters to $password until $length is reached
		while ($i < $length) {
			// pick a random character from the possible ones
			$char = substr($possible, mt_rand(0, strlen($possible)-1), 1);
 
			// we don't want this character if it's already in the password
			if (!strstr($password, $char)) { 
				$password .= $char;
				$i++;
			}
		}
		return $password;
	}
}
?>

make sure you include it in the appcontroller as such

var $components = array('Auth','Email','RandomHelper');

then you can call it as follows in any function

$password= $this->RandomHelper->generateRandomString(4,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz');

Enjoy!

New Bit.ly Class to use with CakePHP or by it self

Gyuri — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:53:52 +0000

If you use service like Twitter where you only get a limited number of characters to post or if you are just sick of dealing with unruly long urls you might be familliar with url shortening services such as Bit.ly.

I personally like them because of they offer a nice API and statistics all for free. It is a pretty quick service too. You can generate hundreds of URLs in just a few seconds. All you have to do is register and you get a username and API key which you will need in the following section.

Here is the code … As you can see I only implemented the shorten for now but I will probably add some of the other stuff later. For some reason WP won’t let me post curl_exec( so be sure to remove the extra character.

class bitly {
	/**
	 * A PHP class to utilize the bitly API
	 * through the Bitly API. Handles:
	 * - Shorten
	 *
	 * Requires PHP5, CURL, JSON and a Bitly account http://bit.ly/
	 *
	 * Bitly API documentation: http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation
	 */
 
	protected $appkey;
	protected $login;
	protected $version;
 
	/**
	* Contruct the Bitly Class
	*
    * @param string, your Bitly account key
    * @param string, your Bitly account login
	*/
	public function __construct($login, $appkey, $version='2.0.1') {
		$this-&gt;login = $login;
		$this-&gt;appkey = $appkey;
		$this-&gt;version = $version;
	}
 
	/**
	* Retrieve a shortened URL
	*
    * @param string, url to shorten
    * @param string, version of Bitly to use
	*/
	public function shorten($url) {
		//create the URL
		$api_url = 'http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version='.$this-&gt;version.'&longUrl='.urlencode($url).'&format=xml&login='.$this-&gt;login.'&apiKey='.$this-&gt;appkey;
		//call the API
		$curl = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $api_url);
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
		$response = curl_ex_ec($curl);
		curl_close($curl);
 
		//parse the XML response and return the url
		$xml_object = new SimpleXMLElement($response);
		return $xml_object-&gt;results-&gt;nodeKeyVal-&gt;shortUrl;
	}
 
}

If you want to use this in CakePHP … you will want to do something like this.
Put this line before the class … I actually use this in a helper since this is a view level class

App::import('Vendor','Bitly', array("file" =&gt; "bitly/bitly.class.php"));

Now you can just invoke it in one of your functions somewhere with two simple calls!

$bitly = new Bitly('username', 'your_API_key_here');
$short_url = $bitly-&gt;shorten($long_url);

Simple as that … oh and one more thing. Be sure to have CURL installed else this won’t work.

SoliTech GmbH » cake

Updated Random String generator CakePHP component

New Bit.ly Class to use with CakePHP or by it self