Producing Unique Widget IDs for CSS

My ultimate goal is to make a unique widget that differs from the norm of my theme. However, my theme does not produce ids for the widget divs.

I was delighted to come across the following thread that shows how to edit functions.php so that widgets’ divs get a unique ID:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/153242

However, the conditional if (function_exists(‘register_sidebars’)) in my functions.php uses a string that is replaced with the html in a later function:

if (function_exists('register_sidebars')) {
	register_sidebars(3, array(
		'before_widget' => '<!--- BEGIN Widget --->',
		'before_title' => '<!--- BEGIN WidgetTitle --->',
		'after_title' => '<!--- END WidgetTitle --->',
		'after_widget' => '<!--- END Widget --->'
	));
}

There are two functions that setup the manipulation of the strings in the condition above. The second function art_sidebar sets up the array with the string and its corresponding html code for the replace. Anyways, here are the two functions:

function art_normalize_widget_style_tokens($content) {
	$bw = '<!--- BEGIN Widget --->';
	$bwt = '<!--- BEGIN WidgetTitle --->';
	$ewt = '<!--- END WidgetTitle --->';
	$bwc = '<!--- BEGIN WidgetContent --->';
	$ewc = '<!--- END WidgetContent --->';
	$ew = '<!--- END Widget --->';
	$result = '';
	$startBlock = 0;
	$endBlock = 0;
	while (true) {
		$startBlock = strpos($content, $bw, $endBlock);
		if (false === $startBlock) {
			$result .= substr($content, $endBlock);
			break;
		}
		$result .= substr($content, $endBlock, $startBlock - $endBlock);
		$endBlock = strpos($content, $ew, $startBlock);
		if (false === $endBlock) {
			$result .= substr($content, $endBlock);
			break;
		}
		$endBlock += strlen($ew);
		$widgetContent = substr($content, $startBlock, $endBlock - $startBlock);
		$beginTitlePos = strpos($widgetContent, $bwt);
		$endTitlePos = strpos($widgetContent, $ewt);
		if ((false == $beginTitlePos) xor (false == $endTitlePos)) {
			$widgetContent = str_replace($bwt, '', $widgetContent);
			$widgetContent = str_replace($ewt, '', $widgetContent);
		} else {
			$beginTitleText = $beginTitlePos + strlen($bwt);
			$titleContent = substr($widgetContent, $beginTitleText, $endTitlePos - $beginTitleText);
			if ('&nbsp;' == $titleContent) {
				$widgetContent = substr($widgetContent, 0, $beginTitlePos)
					. substr($widgetContent, $endTitlePos + strlen($ewt));
			}
		}
		if (false === strpos($widgetContent, $bwt)) {
			$widgetContent = str_replace($bw, $bw . $bwc, $widgetContent);
		} else {
			$widgetContent = str_replace($ewt, $ewt . $bwc, $widgetContent);
		}
		$result .= str_replace($ew, $ewc . $ew, $widgetContent);
	}
	return $result;
}

function art_sidebar($index = 1)
{
	if (!function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')) return false;
	ob_start();
	$success = dynamic_sidebar($index);
	$content = ob_get_clean();
	if (!$success) return false;
	$content = art_normalize_widget_style_tokens($content);
	$replaces = array(
		'<!--- BEGIN Widget --->' => "<div class=\"Block\">\r\n    <div class=\"Block-body\">\r\n",
		'<!--- BEGIN WidgetTitle --->' => "<div class=\"BlockHeader\">\r\n    <div class=\"header-tag-icon\">\r\n        <div class=\"BlockHeader-text\">\r\n",
		'<!--- END WidgetTitle --->' => "\r\n        </div>\r\n    </div>\r\n    <div class=\"l\"></div>\r\n    <div class=\"r\"><div></div></div>\r\n</div>\r\n",
		'<!--- BEGIN WidgetContent --->' => "<div class=\"BlockContent\">\r\n    <div class=\"BlockContent-tl\"></div>\r\n    <div class=\"BlockContent-tr\"><div></div></div>\r\n    <div class=\"BlockContent-bl\"><div></div></div>\r\n    <div class=\"BlockContent-br\"><div></div></div>\r\n    <div class=\"BlockContent-tc\"><div></div></div>\r\n    <div class=\"BlockContent-bc\"><div></div></div>\r\n    <div class=\"BlockContent-cl\"><div></div></div>\r\n    <div class=\"BlockContent-cr\"><div></div></div>\r\n    <div class=\"BlockContent-cc\"></div>\r\n    <div class=\"BlockContent-body\" id=\"".$idGen."\">\r\n",
		'<!--- END WidgetContent --->' => "\r\n    </div>\r\n</div>\r\n",
		'<!--- END Widget --->' => "\r\n    </div>\r\n</div>\r\n"
	);
	$bwt = '<!--- BEGIN WidgetTitle --->';
	$ewt = '<!--- END WidgetTitle --->';
	if ('' == $replaces[$bwt] && '' == $replaces[$ewt]) {
		$startTitle = 0;
		$endTitle = 0;
		$result = '';
		while (true) {
			$startTitle = strpos($content, $bwt, $endTitle);
			if (false == $startTitle) {
				$result .= substr($content, $endTitle);
				break;
			}
			$result .= substr($content, $endTitle, $startTitle - $endTitle);
			$endTitle = strpos($content, $ewt, $startTitle);
			if (false == $endTitle) {
				$result .= substr($content, $startTitle);
				break;
			}
			$endTitle += strlen($ewt);
		}
		$content = $result;
	}
	$content = str_replace(array_keys($replaces), array_values($replaces), $content);
	echo $content;
	return true;
}

As you can probably already tell I know enough about programming concepts to kind of know what is going on, but I don’t understand enough about how WordPress operates (yet!)

Thank you for taking the time to read this and let me know if I need to post additional code or need to clarify!