Displaying pieces of text random

[Anon]

Hi,

I don't know what is the best way to achieve the following:
I've got a large .txt file which stores pieces of text. The textpieces are devided by a string of 7 asterixes (*). What I want to do is display one of the textpieces randomly. But the user should also be able to view all the textpieces at one page. How does one do this? I Can anyone give me a clear explanation on how to handle such a thing?

Thanx, Michiel

[Anon]

Well there are many ways you could do this, here is the first that popped into my head:

Read in the file into a very large string then explode() the string on your ****, finally get a random number between 0 and the length of your new array - 1 and display that element of the array.

[[deleted]]

That would be my first thought too.

If the string is very large it may be worth to see if you can use substr() instead of explode, to save memory or time. (no clue which is better)

[kidestranged]

The above works. Here's another way:

//put the text into an array
$text_array = explode ("*******", $your_text_file);

//randomize the array
shuffle ($text_array);

//display one of them
echo "$text_array";

// if you want to display all of them randomly
for($arrayLoop=0;$arrayLoop <= count($text_array);$arrayLoop++){
echo "text_array[$arrayLoop]";
}

[kidestranged]

woops -
the last text_array should be $text_array. I'm sure you would have caught that though.