Need help translating 2 lines of Perl code to PHP

It has been a while since I worked with Perl and can't really grasp it. I know how to convert the second line, but I put it there to make it easier to understand.

my @chars = map {chr $_} (0x20 ... 0x7e);
$text = $chars[int(rand(@chars))];
$text =~ s/[<>!&]/./g;

PHP:

Any help or pointers appreciated.

Thanks,

 

My Perl is kind of rusty, but that's some of the most convoluted rubbish I've seen for generating one random character between space and null.

Let's go throught that - the first line creates a map, basically an array of characters running from space (0x20/32 DEC) to ~ (0x7E/126)... the next line chooses ONE random character from that set, converts it to an integer to use it as an index of that original array, returning that character... WTF?

$text=chr(rand(32,126));

Should be the equivalent of those first two lines. As perl, it should be:

$text=chr(rand(32..126));

I'm not sure why the blue blazes the original code is so convoluted... much less why you'd need so complex a regexp on a single character.

 

Thank you.

I tried:

rand(0x20,0x7e)

but its giving me numbers. Whats the point of the regular expression if the results are numbers?

Thanks,

 

rand will indeed give you numbers, that's why you have to wrap it in chr() to convert those numbers to their ASCII equivalents.

chr(rand(0x20,0x7e))