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8 years ago
Here is a simple backporting function, it works for PHP >= 5.1

<?php
if (!function_exists('random_int')) {
    function random_int($min, $max) {
        if (!function_exists('mcrypt_create_iv')) {
            trigger_error(
                'mcrypt must be loaded for random_int to work', 
                E_USER_WARNING
            );
            return null;
        }
        
        if (!is_int($min) || !is_int($max)) {
            trigger_error('$min and $max must be integer values', E_USER_NOTICE);
            $min = (int)$min;
            $max = (int)$max;
        }
        
        if ($min > $max) {
            trigger_error('$max can\'t be lesser than $min', E_USER_WARNING);
            return null;
        }
        
        $range = $counter = $max - $min;
        $bits = 1;
        
        while ($counter >>= 1) {
            ++$bits;
        }
        
        $bytes = (int)max(ceil($bits/8), 1);
        $bitmask = pow(2, $bits) - 1;
 
        if ($bitmask >= PHP_INT_MAX) {
            $bitmask = PHP_INT_MAX;
        }
 
        do {
            $result = hexdec(
                bin2hex(
                    mcrypt_create_iv($bytes, MCRYPT_DEV_URANDOM)
                )
            ) & $bitmask;
        } while ($result > $range);
 
        return $result + $min;
    }
}
?>

Randomness test

<?php
$max = 100; // number of random values
$test = 1000000;

$array = array_fill(0, $max, 0);

for ($i = 0; $i < $test; ++$i) {
    ++$array[random_int(0, $max-1)];
}

function arrayFormatResult(&$item) {
    global $test, $max; // try to avoid this nowdays ;)
    
    $perc = ($item/($test/$max))-1;
    $item .= ' '. number_format($perc, 4, '.', '') .'%';
}

array_walk($array, 'arrayFormatResult');

print_r($array);
?>
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