Randomizing Content with PHP

ID: PHP - 15
Date Added: 2007-12-22
Category: PHP
Difficulty: Novice
Author: Rei

This tutorial will teach you how to randomize anything: images, links, paragraphs, texts using php. This is a very simple tutorial, and you can do this without any knowledge of php at all!

<?php
$filename = "random.txt";
$file = file($filename);

  srand((double)microtime()*1000000);
  while ($Random == "") {
  $Random = ereg_replace("\n","",$file[rand(0,count($file))]);
  }

  print "$Random";
?>

This is one way of doing this. You must create a file called random.txt, and insert anything you want. However, you must separate each link or value with a new line. This is a sample of a text page:

<a href="link.html" target=_blank>Akatsuki Designs</a>
<a href="link.html" target=_blank>Kyoukei</a>
<a href="link.html" target=_blank>JSound</a>
Quote 1
Quote 2
Quote 3
<img src="something.gif">
<img src="something.gif">

The second method is simpler, requires no .txt files, but you will define your random content within the php. This is recommended for when you don't have a lot of things to randomize:

<?php
$quotes[] = "Quote1";
$quotes[] = "Quote2";
$quotes[] = "Quote3";
$quotes[] = "Quote4";
$quotes[] = "Quote5";
$quotes[] = "Quote6";

srand ((double) microtime() * 1000000);
$randomquote = rand(0,count($quotes)-1);

echo " " . $quotes[$randomquote] . " ";
?>

You can modify $quotes[] = "Quote1"; to your heart's content =)

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Randomizing Content with PHP