include random files (not images)

Jon7800

Good evening,

I am looking to include a random page for our website home page. Basically we want about 5 rotating splash pages that will randomize on refresh. Is it possible to pull random index pages in an include() ?

for example, i have a directory with 5 files in it: index1.php, index2.php, index3.php, index4.php, index5.php. -all formatted the same to be a splash page...

First time you hit the site it would be include('index1.php');
refresh would be include('index3.php'); etc. etc..

I've seen plenty of scripts for including random images, but haven't seen any for including random pages....

Thanks in advance!
-Jon

bretticus

Something like the following should be sufficient. There may be better ways of doing this, but to answer your question...

//this is index.php
$file_to_include = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/index" . rand(1, 5) . ".php";
if ( file_exists($file_to_include) && is_readible($file_to_include) )
	include($file_to_include);

Jon7800

Thank you!

Worked like a charm as soon as i changed 'readible' to 'readable' ;-)

It would be nice to have it just pull random pages out of a directory with out having to specify 1-5 ...so if i just added or deleted files (now have 6 or 7 files), i wouldn't have to go in and edit the code each time.

Anyone know of a way to do this?

bretticus

Yeah, you got to watch my "off-the-hip" code 🙂 . Glad you were astute enough to fix that.

It would be nice to have it just pull random pages out of a directory with out having to specify 1-5 ...so if i just added or deleted files (now have 6 or 7 files), i wouldn't have to go in and edit the code each time.

Well, since we are checking for existing and readAble files, you coudl increase the range on rand() to say rand(1,99). You would have to do it in a while loop until you get one (costly.) And in case it NEVER finds a random value that coincides with a real file, you should probably have a DEFAULT include file after say 3 bad attempts.

bretticus

I suppose you could read the files in the directory first and get a range to work with ... OR ... even better... insert each filename into an array and use array-rand to get the file to include.

bretticus

MAN...you owe me 😃

I'm normally not a "write-code-for-you" kinda guy...but I'm feeling very bored and helpful today 🙂

include(array_rand(extract_files('/path/to/files')));

function extract_files($path) {
	$results = array();
	if ($handle = opendir($path)) {
	   /* This is the correct way to loop over the directory. */
	   while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
	       if ( is_readable($file) ) {
	       		$results[] = $file;
	       }
	   }
	   closedir($handle);
	}
	return $results;
}

Again, this code is UNTESTED but the concept is sound.