A Drupal get user id function (uid)

Just a quick note here to share a Drupal get user id (uid) function. I've found that when I'm developing a Drupal module or Drupal application, I often need to access the user id, so I created this simple function and include it in a common utilities module:

# return the current drupal user id (uid)
function get_user_id() {
  global $user;
  return $user->uid;
}

As you can see, the code accesses the global Drupal user object ($user), then gets the uid from the user object.

I use this function all the time when performing SQL database queries where I need to limit data access to the current user, or add new data belonging to the current user, and occasionally use it for other purposes.