soren at byu dot edu
14-Mar-2003 07:23
Let's say that you want to generate a MySQL password hash from a plain text password. Normally, you would just submit the MySQL query "SELECT PASSWORD('password')", but if for some reason you can't access to MySQL database directly, then you can use the following function (translated right out of the MySQL source code):

function mysql_password($passStr) {
$nr=0x50305735;
$nr2=0x12345671;
$add=7;
$charArr = preg_split("//", $passStr);

foreach ($charArr as $char) {
if (($char == '') || ($char == ' ') || ($char == '\t')) continue;
$charVal = ord($char);
$nr ^= ((($nr & 63) + $add) * $charVal) + ($nr << 8);
$nr2 += ($nr2 << 8) ^ $nr;
$add += $charVal;
}

return sprintf("%08x%08x", ($nr & 0x7fffffff), ($nr2 & 0x7fffffff));
}

example:

<? print mysql_password("hello"); ?>

outputs:

70de51425df9d787

Which is the same result you get if you do "SELECT PASSWORD('hello')" directly in MySQL. Hopefully you'll never be in a situation where you have to use this, but if you need it (like I did), it's here.