Question

I am creating a web page where someone can visit it. They type a question in a field and click a button, and a response is passed back to them. (Kind of like a magic 8 ball).

What I’m trying to do is set it up something like this:

http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/997/layoutoi.png

I’m still new to hand-coding things – I have a book on HTML/CSS and one on PHP, which lay still unread, so I’ll probably need a step-by-step process. (I have a host and everything, so that’s already taken care of.) Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

To do it without a page load (i.e. immediately after the button click), you’ll have to do it in Javascript (working jsfiddle example here)

<a id="myButton" href="#">
    click here to get random stuff
</a>

<div id="myRandomDiv">
</div>

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
    var randomStrings = [
        "hello 1",
        "hello 2",
        "hello 3", 
        "hello 4",
        "hello 5",
    ];



    var randomDiv = document.getElementById("myRandomDiv");

    document.getElementById("myButton").addEventListener("click", function() {
          randomIndex = Math.ceil((Math.random()*randomStrings.length-1));
          newText = randomStrings[randomIndex];
          randomDiv.innerHTML = newText;
    });
</script>    

---

To do this instead in PHP (which will require a new page load), you could do this:

<?php


$randomThings = array(
    'random thing 1',    
    'random thing 2',    
    'random thing 3',    
    'random thing 4',    
    'random thing 5',    
    'random thing 6',    
    'random thing 7 ',    
);

?>




<!-- REST OF YOUR PAGE -->

<?php

echo $randomThings[mt_rand(0,count($randomThings)-1)];

?>

<!-- OTHER STUFF -->

First, we create an array (‘list’) of random things and store it in the variable $randomThings.

Elements in an array can be accessed using $variableName[$index] — in this case, the indices will simply be 0,1,2,3,4,5,6.

The reason this one-liner (beginning with ‘echo’) works is, mt_rand is going to return a random number between 0 and 6, so it’ll grab a random element from the $randomThings array. echo will then spit it to the page.