I spent some time looking for how to generate a large random number, in the end I've settled for reading directly from /dev/urandom
I know this is a *nix only solution, but I figured that it might come in handy to someone else.
The value $size is the size in bits, it could be simplified greatly if you want the size in bytes, but bits was more helpful to what I needed.
<?php
function bcrand($size)
{
$filename = "/dev/urandom";
$handle = fopen($filename, "r");
$bin_urand = fread($handle, ceil($size/8.0));
fclose($handle);
$mask = (($size % 8 < 5) ? '0' : '') . dechex(bindec(str_repeat('1', $size % 8))) . str_repeat('FF', floor($size/8));
$binmask = pack("H*", $mask);
$binrand = $binmask & $bin_urand;
$hexnumber = unpack("H*", $binrand);
$hexnumber = $hexnumber[''];
$numlength = strlen($hexnumber);
$decnumber = 0;
for($x = 1; $x <= $numlength; $x++)
{
$place = $numlength - $x;
$operand = hexdec(substr($hexnumber,$place,1));
$exponent = bcpow(16,$x-1);
$decValue = bcmul($operand, $exponent);
$decnumber = bcadd($decValue, $decnumber);
}
return $decnumber;
}
?>
