Randomizing array?

Anon

Greetings,

I'm drawing a blank on randomizing querry results from mySQL and could use some input.
I want to do simple searches, but have the results displayed in different order every time.
EX:
If a user searches for "Tomatoe" "worms" and "rotted", all the matching keys from the table "Tomatoes" will be displayed as a list. If another user performs the same search, the returned information is the same, but the order in which they are listed changes.

Any help would be greatly obliged.

Anon

I may be way off target here, but how about a ORDER BY [column] at the end of your query?

Anon

The easiest thing to do, as far I can think of it would be to load the query results into an array and then randomly pick members of that array. Here's a pseudo-code for this:

Load N result rows into N objects and insert each into $array ;
for ( $len = N ; $len ; $len-- )
{
$rnd = rand() * $len ;
$randItem = $array[$rnd] ;
diplsayItem($randItem) ;
$array->removeItemAt($rnd} ;
}

Hope that helps

Yaron Yogev

Anon

If you read everything into a PHP array first, shuffle($array) would do the trick.

Just remember to do a srand(time()) first.

Anon

I'm not a programmer and i dont want this project because of that. Remember that saying "Redhat is not Linux"? How about "Linux users are not programmers"... haha.

Anyway, I'm stuck with this cursed project and I cant do the things I know how to do untill I'm finished, so if someone could help a non-programmer out, I promise to never allow myself to get talked into something like this again.

Here's what i have so far:

setup SQL statement

$SQL = " SELECT * from users";

execute SQL statement

$len = mysql_db_query($db, $SQL, $cid);

check for errors

if (!$len) { echo( mysql_error()); }


else {
    # display results
    echo ("<P><DT><B>Full Listing Of Database Contents (to be changed to something more usable AFTER it randomises</B><BR>\n");
    while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($len)) {

    $email = $row["email"];
    $password = $row["password"];
    $date = $row["date"];

        echo ("<p></p>\n");
        echo ("<p>'$email''$password''$date'</p>\n");
    }
    echo ("</DT></P>");
}

So all i want to do is randomise the output. thats all. If you view the output, it will be in one oerder, if you view it again, the order will be different.

I have spent 5 hours trying to implement the suggestions so kindly put forth, but to no avail. I guess if I was a programmer I could do it.

Thanks in advance.

Anon

Part of loving *NIX is being able to program it! At any rate here is your answer (I believe).

$shown = arra();
$sql = "SELECT * FROM table";
$result = mysql_query($sql);

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
    $random[] = $row;
}

srand(microtime());
while($true){
    $rand = rand(0,sizeof($random));
    if(!in_array($rand,$shown)){
// $row is the array from the DB above.
          $row = $random[$rand];
           echo $row['this']." ".$row['that'];
$shown[] = $rand;
     }
     if(sizeof($shown) == sizeof($random)){
$true = 0;
     }
}

That should work just fine. Remember that you need to have PHP 4.0 (or above), etc. running.