[RESOLVED] Randomly Pairing People from a Table

[jawa]

I'm trying to create an app that pairs people from a table.

I'm kind of stuck on setting up the pairings randomly. I have a function that generates random numbers and sticks them into an array based on the number of people I have in the table. See below:

unset($arr);
$arr = array();
while ( count($arr) < $count ) {    

	$x = mt_rand(1,$count);     

	if (!in_array($x,$arr)) { 
		$arr[] = $x; 
	}
}

But, now that I've got my random numbers, I'm not quite sure how to get the row numbers from the table to match up with the random numbers inside my array.

For instance, let's say I have 4 people in my table...
Sam Adams
Steve Miller
Kevin Smith
Ted Williams

In my array I have 2, 4, 1, 3.

How can I get the Steve match up with Ted, and Sam to match up with Kevin?

Any help is greatly appreciated...

Thanks!
-J

[devinemke]

you could spool the db table into an array, then [man]shuffle[/man] the array, then use [man]array_chunk[/man] to split it up into pairs. this wold ensure that every record is randomly paired with another. the only problem would be if there is an odd number of records then there will alway be one odd man out (which will always be in the last array index of the result of [man]array_chunk[/man]).

[jawa]

That got it! I wound up populating an array with the data from the sql request, and doing exactly what you proposed. Worked like a charm!

Thanks for the help!

-J