How to Select 10 Random Things from a List in PHP

How do I select 10 random things from a list in PHP?

You can select one or more random items from an array using array_rand() function.

php get two different random array elements

You could always remove the element that you selected the first time round, then you wouldn't pick it again. If you don't want to modify the array create a copy.

 for ($i=0; $i<2; $i++) {
    $random = array_rand($my_array);  # one random array element number
    $get_it = $my_array[$random];    # get the letter from the array
    echo $get_it;

    unset($my_array[$random]);
 }

How do I select random values from an array in PHP?

$result = array();
foreach( array_rand($my_array, 8) as $k ) {
  $result[] = $my_array[$k];
}

Get random item from array

echo $items[array_rand($items)];

array_rand()

Get five unique random PHP values selected from an array and put them in separate variables

You can shuffle the array and use list to assign the values

$arr = array("aaa", "bbb", "ccc", "ddd", "eee", "fff", "ggg");

shuffle( $arr );
list($one, $two, $three, $four, $five) = $arr;

Doc: shuffle(), list()

How to get random value out of an array?

You can also do just:

$k = array_rand($array);
$v = $array[$k];

This is the way to do it when you have an associative array.

Randomly pick element in array then remove from the array

Shuffle the array in random order, and just pop the last element off.

$array = [...];

shuffle($array);

while($element = array_pop($array)){
  echo 'Random element:' . $element;
}

Select Random Unique String From List in PHP

You could try copying the array, then shuffling the copy and finally popping the results.

For example:

$array = array('blue','green','yellow','purple');
$copy = $array;
shuffle($copy);
while(!empty($copy)){
    echo array_pop($copy);
}

Choose 3 different random values from an array

Shamelessly stolen from the PHP manual:

<?php
$input = array("Neo", "Morpheus", "Trinity", "Cypher", "Tank");
$rand_keys = array_rand($input, 2);
echo $input[$rand_keys[0]] . "\n";
echo $input[$rand_keys[1]] . "\n";
?>

http://us2.php.net/array_rand

Note that, as of PHP 5.2.10, you may want to shuffle (randomize) the keys that are returned via shuffle($rand_keys), otherwise they will always be in order (smallest index first). That is, in the above example, you could get "Neo, Trinity" but never "Trinity, Neo."

If the order of the random elements is not important, then the above code is sufficient.

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