PHP randomisation

Wimnat · 2 Jan 2007 at 16:26

I have a simple website which just basically produces boxes of different content repeatedly in the page.

Eg.

Some content 1
Some content 2
Some content 3

At the moment the page is pure html. I was wondering if anyone could think of a way, perhaps using php, to randomise the layout each time the page is loaded. So one time it would be as above then you hit F5 and it would be...

Some content 1
Some content 3
Some content 2

etc.

Any ideas?

Wimnat · 2 Jan 2007 at 16:50

Yeh, it's all static. It really is this simplest of things and I didn't want to get into sql with it all.

What you have above seems to work well.

Thanks very much!

Wimnat · 2 Jan 2007 at 18:03

Is there any way to put a for loop in an array construct?

$files = array ('Some content 1', 'Some content 2', 'Some content 3');

Some content x could eventually go in to the hundreds and i really don't feel like typing out each 'Some content xxx' for each entry.

Wimnat · 2 Jan 2007 at 22:38

Cheers. I've used your idea but taken it one step further by dynamically creating the 'thelinks.php' file...

Code:

$PATH = $_ENV['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
	
	$d=$PATH.$dirPath; 
	
	$dir = opendir($d); 
		
	$myFile = "$fileName.txt";
	$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
	
	while ($f = readdir($dir)) {
		$stringData = $f."\n";
		fwrite($fh, $stringData);
	}
	
	fclose($fh);

The only problem is it puts in '.' and '..' at the start of the file which then means i get two broken links when constructing my links from the array.

Any ideas how to get around this?