The Bakery Everything CakePHP

A neat function I just discovered while looking for a useful CakePHP tip to save me from putting my head into a cake is contained in the NeatString class which rests in /cake/libs/neat_string.php

The function of interest is NeatString::randomPassword($length, $available_chars) which can be used to create a random password with a given $length which is made out of the $available_chars. By default $available_chars contains [A-Z0-9] (All upper case letters + numbers), but you can extend it to use any characters you consider valid for a password (like underscores, dot's, etc.).

The usage of the function is rather simple, but let's take a look at a little example anyway:

Imagine you want to generate a simple password made up of 8 letters in your controller and display it to the user:

Controller Class:

<?php 
uses('neat_string');
$this->set('password', NeatString::randomPassword(8));
?>
Or be a little bit more fancy and allow a whole bunch of other characters:

Controller Class:

<?php 
NeatString::randomPassword(8, '.,#[]()\$!/\\&+-§%=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABDEFHKMNPRTWXYABDEFHKMNPRTWXY23456789');
?> Taken from http://www.thinkingphp.org/2006/09/15/dessert-3-generate-a-random-password/

NeatString also hold some other little functions that could be useful.

NeatString::toArray($string) will split any string into an array of characters, with whitespace removed.

NeatString::toCompressed($string) removes all whitespace, and convert it to lowercase.

NeatString::toRoman($string) will convert all Cyrillic characters into roman ones.