Question

So I have an associative array and I want to return 2 random values from it.
This code only returns 1 array value, which is any of the 4 numbers at random.

$array = array('a' => 1, 'b' => 2, 'c' => 3, 'd' => 4);
$key = array_rand($array); //array_rand($array,2); Putting 2 returns Illegal offset type
$value = $array[$key];
print_r($value); //prints a single random value (ex. 3)

How can I return 2 comma separated values from the array values only? Something like 3,4?

Answer 1

Grab the keys from the array with array_keys(), shuffle the keys with shuffle(), and print out the values corresponding to the first two keys in the shuffled keys array, like so:

$array = array('a' => 1, 'b' => 2, 'c' => 3, 'd' => 4);
$keys = array_keys( $array);
shuffle( $keys);
echo $array[ $keys[0] ] . ',' . $array[ $keys[1] ];

Demo

Or, you can use array_rand()‘s second parameter to grab two keys, like so:

$array = array('a' => 1, 'b' => 2, 'c' => 3, 'd' => 4);
$keys = array_rand( $array, 2);
echo $array[ $keys[0] ] . ',' . $array[ $keys[1] ];

Demo