note 63748 rejected from function.array-rand by bjori

Note Submitter: almond at acm dot org ---- If you use array_rand() with a labeled array of object, it appears to generate an array of numeric indexes and not an array of string indexes (at least under PHP 4.4.2). For example, if you have <?php $data = array ('name1' => $obj1, 'name2' => $obj2, ...); ?> Then <?php array_rand(data,2) ?> will produce something like ARRAY([0] => 13, [1] =>5) and not ARRAY([0] => 'name13', [1] => 'name5'). Given this behavior, I produced the following code to produce a random sample (without replacement) from a labeled array preserving the labels. <?php function sample($data,$n) { $result = array(); $keys = array_keys($data); $members = array_rand($keys,$n); foreach ($members as $index) { $key = $keys[$index]; $result[$key] = $data[$key]; } return $result; } ?>