/**
* Generates a salt of specified length. The salt consists of characters in the set [./0-9A-Za-z].
*
* @param integer $length The number of characters to return.
*
* @return string The string of random characters.
*
* @since 12.2
*/
protected function getSalt($length)
{
$bytes = ceil($length * 6 / 8);
$randomData = str_replace('+', '.', base64_encode(JCrypt::getRandomBytes($bytes)));
return substr($randomData, 0, $length);
}