[Phpwm] Encryption

[pete graham]

I need to email people a url with a encrypted variable, I will be
encrypting the id of a database item. When the user goes to the url
the server will decrypt the url, select the item with the id from the
db, then display it.

I was planning to use PEAR Crypt_Blowfish to do this, however produces
output like:
)Y<��hx#���~�|U%
This needs url encoding so my link looks like this:
www.mysite.com/page.php?id=%29Y%3C%B9%E0hx%23%90%FA%C4%7E%DC%7CU%25
Which looks kind of naff in my opinion.

Is there an alternative symmetric encryption facility in PHP which
will produce "nicer" but still secure cyphered text? something like
www.mysite.com/page.php?id=2sg09sadkb2lnv. I haven't been able to test
the PHP mcrypt functions as there not setup on the server I'm using at
the moment.

I realise the alternative would be to hash (sha1) the id and then
store the hash in the DB, however I didn't really want to store the
extra data.

Thanks, Pete