Posted by Geoff Berrow on 03/03/07 10:21

Message-ID: <fjohu29bo3enigbupm4npjmino161i2g86@4ax.com> from Fred
Atkinson contained the following:

> I'll look your coding over. Maybe I can figure it out well
>enough to code it into my page. .

If the data is structured in an organised way it will be easier to
extract in the way you want (even if that way is random).

Getting a random number $z (let's not get into a discussion about true
randomness kiddies) is easy. Say you wanted a random number between $x
and $y. You just do $z=rand($x,$y);

Now you can see that if images are coded with a sequential number as the
name it would be easy to do

<img src="image<?php echo $z;?> alt="">

However, chances are they won't be. Arrays however, can have numeric
keys.

So if you have an array like this

$array[]=cat.jpg;
$array[]=dog.jpg;
$array[]=fish.jpg;
$array[]=goat.jpg;

PHP will assign numeric keys to the array, starting at zero

The number of keys is derived from count($array). So the last key is
Applying that to the above we get

$z=rand(0,(count($array)-1));
(aside - I know about shuffle folks - this is easier to explain)

and you output it like this
<img src="image<?php echo $array[$z];?> alt="">


Now your only problem is getting the contents of a given directory into
an array. For this you have to loop through the contents of a directory
to find all the image files and assign them to the array.

See my gallery script for an idea of how this is done
www.walkingoutdoors.co.uk/Geoff/gallery/gallery.zip

example:
http://www.walkingoutdoors.co.uk/Geoff/tryfan/

--
Geoff Berrow 0110001001101100010000000110
001101101011011001000110111101100111001011
100110001101101111001011100111010101101011

[Back to original message]