Question

What I have here is a PHP page working with the Facebook API.

What I’m trying to do is (after permissions are set by the user), to get the user’s friends’ user IDs via: $facebook->api('/me/friends'). The problem is, I would only like to get random 10 friends. I could easily limit results to 10 by using /me/friends?limit=10, but then again that wouldn’t be random.

So here is what I have right now:

     $friendsLists = $facebook->api('/me/friends');

     function getFriends($friendsLists){
       foreach ($friendsLists as $friends) {
          foreach ($friends as $friend) {
             // do something with the friend, but you only have id and name
             $id = $friend['id'];
             $name = $friend['name'];
        shuffle($id);
     return "@[".$id.":0],";
          }
       }
     }

$friendsies = getFriends($friendsLists);
$message = 'I found this Cover at <3 '.$Link.'

'.$friendsies.' check it out! :)';

I have tried shuffle(), and the first option from here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1656983/1399030, but I think I could be doing something wrong because they don’t return anything. I’m pretty sure I’m close, but what I’ve tried so far is not working. Can it be done?

Answer 1

you’ll want to use the shuffle before you foreach, so that you actually shuffle the array.

after that, you’ll want to limit to 10 friends. I’d suggest adding an $i var to count to ten, and adding to a new array.

Something like this:

function getFriends($friendsLists){
   $formatted_friends = array();
   $i = 0;
   foreach ($friendsLists as $friends) {
      // I'm guessing we'll need to shuffle here, but might also be before the previous foreach
      shuffle($friends);
      foreach ($friends as $friend) {
         // do something with the friend, but you only have id and name
         // add friend as one of the ten
         $formatted_friends[$i] = $friend;
         // keep track of the count
         $i++;
         // once we hit 10 friends, return the result in an array
         if ($i == 10){ return $formatted_friends; }
      }
   }
 }

keep in mind though that it’ll return an array and not a string that you can use in an echo. If you want, you can put this in an echo for debugging purposes:

echo 'friends: '.print_r($friendsies, true);