Question

I have like 50 strings.

$rand = rand(0,50);

$name[1] = "Jane";
$name[2] = "Marienne";
...
...
...
$name[50] = "Mary";

echo $name[$rand];

I want to echo “Marienne” if $rand==”2″ for example. But the code above is not working. And I don’t want to use if statement because there are too many strings. What do you suggest me ? Thanks.

Answer 1

Your posted code should work if you don’t have “DOH” moments like an uninitialized $name[0] key.

However, if you want to avoid that problem altogether you could use the array_rand^docs function to pick out a (pseudo) random array key:

$names = array('Peter', 'Paul', 'John');
echo $names[array_rand($names)];

Alternatively, instead of hard-coding in 50 as your max in the random range, why not try:

rand(0, count($names)-1);