Question

If I use:

$t = time();
echo $t;

This will output something like: 1319390934

I have two questions:

1. This value can be used as unique id ?
2. how to generate from it a date?

I can’t use uniqid(), because I need a value that can be used to order (recent).

Answer 1

Using time() as mentioned will give you a sortable way to create unique IDs. Concatenating strings will also further randomize your desired result and still keep it sortable:

$uniqueId= time().'-'.mt_rand();