Summary
As per the Drawing Random Floating-Point Numbers from an Interval. Frédéric Goualard, ACM Trans. Model. Comput. Simul., 32:3, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503512 paper, the $min + rand() / randmax() * ($max - $min) construction of Base::randomFloat()
https://github.com/FakerPHP/Faker/blob/2.0/src/Faker/Provider/Base.php#L111-L132
is unsafe and depending on the inputs might:
- Return values outside of the requested range.
- Return values that are biased towards specific subintervals.
This is unfixable in userland. The only solution is to leverage PHP 8.3's Randomizer::getFloat() which will do the right thing. See the https://wiki.php.net/rfc/randomizer_additions RFC for additional details.
Summary
As per the Drawing Random Floating-Point Numbers from an Interval. Frédéric Goualard, ACM Trans. Model. Comput. Simul., 32:3, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503512 paper, the
$min + rand() / randmax() * ($max - $min)construction ofBase::randomFloat()https://github.com/FakerPHP/Faker/blob/2.0/src/Faker/Provider/Base.php#L111-L132
is unsafe and depending on the inputs might:
This is unfixable in userland. The only solution is to leverage PHP 8.3's Randomizer::getFloat() which will do the right thing. See the https://wiki.php.net/rfc/randomizer_additions RFC for additional details.