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Asked: 2026-05-23T15:36:47+00:00

I am trying to port a piece of code from perl to php. The

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I am trying to port a piece of code from perl to php. The perl code snippet is part of akamai’s video on demand link generation script. The script generates seed based on the location / URL of the video file (which will always be constant for a single URL). And then it is used in generating serial ID for stream (which is basically a random number between 1 and 2000 using the seed). Here is the perl code.

$seed=6718;
srand($seed);
print(int(rand(1999)) + 1); // return 442 every time

And the converted PHP code is:

$seed=6718;
srand($seed);
echo(rand(0, 1999) + 1); //returns 155 every time

Does php rand behaves differently than perl one?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Yes. You can’t depend on their algorithms being the same. For perl, which rand is used depends on what platform your perl was built for.

    You may have more luck using a particular algorithm; for instance, Mersenne Twister looks to be available for both PHP and Perl.
    Update: trying it produces different results, so that one at least won’t do the trick.

    Update 2: From the perl numbers you show, your perl is using the drand48 library; I don’t know whether that’s available for PHP at all, and google isn’t helping.

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