I've researched this a lot but can't find a satisfactory answer; how do I create a PHP script that will generate a new number each day? Obviously I'm using this for a reason other than to generate a random number daily, but I won't go into that reason, it'll just make this question more complicated. So I'm asking this: How do I generate a random number which will change each day in PHP? Using MySQL will be no problem, but it must be automatic so I won't have to manually change it daily. (Here's my 'script' to generate a random number)
<?php
echo rand(1,100)
?>
Any answers are appreciated, Thanks - Hugh
Use time() function to generate seed, then use regular rand.
This way you should't to store it anywhere and you always can regenerate it when needed.
function randomEveryDay()
{
$now = time();
$today = $now - ($now % 86400); //86400 = 1 day in seconds
srand($today);
return rand();
}
Or more interesting example without random at all.
function randomEveryDay() {
$now = time();
$today = $now - ($now % 86400);
$hash = sha1('salt string'.$today);
return intval('0x' . substr($hash, 6, 8));
}
Every day you will get the same number in $today, then use any cryptographic\non cryptographic hash function to generate "random".
This is fairly a simple task as long as you understand the basics of crontabs.
Step One: Create the script. This is basically going to be what creates the "text" then inputs it into the database via mysqli. For example, if we are generating a random number, what you have so far is good, you will just need to insert it into a database table. I recommend using a time stamp to give what day it was generated on
Step Two: Create a cronjob. Use the servers crontab to run a task every day, this can be done by adding this to the cron file: This will run a cron each new day.
00 01 * * * php path/to/your/generate.php
Step Three Fetch result from database by using the current date. If you are needing to display that text, pull it from the database using whatever the current day is from date() or DateTime
It's impossible to give a good answer without knowing exactly what you want to do, so this will generate a new number every day:
echo date('Ymd');