It is explained in the PHP documentation, here is the excerpt:
" If the salt argument is not provided, one will be randomly generated by PHP each time you call this function.
Some operating systems support more than one type of encryption. In fact, sometimes the standard DES-based encryption is replaced by an MD5-based encryption algorithm. The encryption type is triggered by the salt argument. At install time, PHP determines the capabilities of the crypt function and will accept salts for other encryption types. If no salt is provided, PHP will auto-generate a standard two character salt by default, unless the default encryption type on the system is MD5, in which case a random MD5-compatible salt is generated. PHP sets a constant named CRYPT_SALT_LENGTH which tells you whether a regular two character salt applies to your system or the longer twelve character salt is applicable. "
But is your question really how to pick to characters randomly? That is demonstration in the Perl documentation:$salt = join '', ('.', '/', 0..9, 'A'..'Z', 'a'..'z')[rand 64, rand 64]
Perl / MySQL / HTML+CSS