note 7730 deleted from rand by hholzgra

I have found a better and more reliable way of getting a random record from an sql database with php. Methods that I had found on the Internet forced you to linearly cycle through records until you reached a suitably random one. Other methods required you to have a consecutively numbered index field in the table. Although most tables DO have numerical indexes, sometimes the numbers are not consecutive. This is what I came up with: function randomrec($table, &$row, $db) { $sql = "SELECT * FROM $table"; $result = mysql_query($sql, $db); $numrecs = mysql_num_rows($result); srand((double)microtime()*1000000); $recnum = rand(0, $numrecs-1); $sql = "SELECT * FROM $table LIMIT $recnum, 1"; $result = mysql_query($sql, $db); $row = mysql_fetch_array($result); }