generating random letters and splitting up words

jwb666

I have two quetions that I desperately need answering:

how do you generate a random letter? I can generate random numbers by using range 1,1000 and microtime 1000 (or something like that), do I use the same method but use range A-Z?
Can you split up words into seperate letters? for example: a user types in "word", can I split it up and use the seperate letters (w, o, r, d)? I know I can reverse them and manipulate them with stuff like $strrev.

Please help!

laserlight

You could try that method, though I have never tried it myself.

A more common method is to declare an array/string of acceptable characters, or use [man]range/man for such a declaration, then pick characters from this array/string based on pseudorandom numbers generated.

Yes, one way would be to access each character, e.g.
$str = "word";
echo $str{2}; //outputs 'r'

drawmack

Originally posted by jwb666
1. how do you generate a random letter? I can generate random numbers by using range 1,1000 and microtime 1000 (or something like that), do I use the same method but use range A-Z?

generate a random number and use it as an ascii value. here are the functions you'll want
http://www.php.net/chr
http://www.asciitable.com/

2. Can you split up words into seperate letters? for example: a user types in "word", can I split it up and use the seperate letters (w, o, r, d)? I know I can reverse them and manipulate them with stuff like $strrev.

this is a bit trickyer, here

<?php
function strToAry($word) {
    $retval = array();
    for($i=0;$i<strlen($word);$i++) {
        array_push($retval,substr($word,$i,1));
    } //end for
    return $word;
} //end strToAry
?>

laserlight

Actually, if you did intend to convert the string into an array, drawmack's code should work except that you should return $retval, not $word, which is probably a typo.

drawmack, I thought that one should take the evaluation of strlen() out of the test condition? Wouldnt that be more efficient?

i.e. a possible function:

function strToArray($word) {
	$retval = array();
	$len = strlen($word);
	for ($i = 0; $i < $len; $i++) {
		$retval[] = $word{$i};
	}
	return $retval;
}