Question

I’ve been looking for this for a while but with no success.

I am trying to implement a recomendation bar, for example like in youtube, when you are seeing a video it shows the list or recommended videos on the right.

At this moment I am using this method:

$offset_result = mysql_query( " SELECT FLOOR(RAND() * COUNT(*)) AS `offset` FROM `$tablename` ");
$offset_row = mysql_fetch_object($offset_result ); 
$offset = $offset_row->offset;
$result_rand = mysql_query( " SELECT * FROM `$tablename` LIMIT $offset, 9 " );

This works fine, but sometimes doesn’t show any result, and the problem is also that its not completely random, because it shows for example the first ID as 200, so the next result will be id 201 and then 202 and so.

I would like to know if there is a way to show this 9 randon results, for example 1º result id 500, 2º result id 10, 3º result id 788, etc etc?

Thank you

Answer 1

You can use php rand() function to create 5 numbers and save them in an array:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.rand.php

<?php
$rand_array = array();
for($i=1;$i<5;$i++) {
    $rand_array[$i] = rand(0,500);
}
?>

and after that create a query with every int with a foreach loop and work with your data.

<?php
foreach ($rand_array as $integer) {
     $q = "SELECT * from $tablename WHERE id='$integer';";
}
?>

Does this helps?