You can use chunk_split() to add the hyphens. substr() is used to remove the trailing hyphen it adds, leaving only those hyphens that actually separate groups.
return substr(chunk_split($password, 4, '-'), 0, 24);
However, note that shuffle() not only uses a relatively poor PRNG but also will not allow the same character to be used twice. Instead, use mt_rand() in a for loop, and then using chunk_split() is easy to avoid:
$password = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
if ( $i != 0 && $i % 4 == 0 ) { // nonzero and divisible by 4
$password .= '-';
}
$password .= $chars[mt_rand(0, count($chars) - 1)];
}
return $password;
(Even mt_rand() is not a cryptographically secure PRNG. If you need to generate something that must be extremely hard to predict (e.g. an encryption key or password reset token), use openssl_random_pseudo_bytes() to generate bytes and then a separate function such as bin2hex() to encode them into printable characters. I am not familiar with Yii, so I cannot say whether or not it has a function for this.)