The thing I both love and dislike about programming is that in most
cases the answer is painfully obvious when presented to me!! The
various methods I'd tried involved using rand but I never thought to
just do rand($rows)...I should have thought of that!!
Thanks Jeff, I found both suggestions to contain useful information, I
am now well on my way to my next challenge.
For what its worth, I think more examples like this in the FAQ would be
of great help.
Steve
On Sun, 2002-06-02 at 01:05, Jeff Zucker wrote:
> Jeff Zucker wrote:
> >
>
> > Steve Tyler wrote:
> >
> >> - I have a (postgresql) DB table containing quoteId, quote, author
> >> - I want to have a randomly selected quote appear on a web page
> >
> > How about:
> >
> > my $ids = $dbh->selectcol_arrayref("
>
> [snip]
>
> Or, given the fact that PG can return the number of rows without
> explicitly fetching and that it has a limit clause, this would work with
> fewer explicit fetches than my previous example, but wouldn't be as
> portable:
>
> my $sth=$dbh->prepare("SELECT quoteID FROM quotes");
> $sth->execute;
> my $rows = $sth->rows;
> $sth->finish;
> my $random_id = int rand($rows) ;
> print $dbh->selectrow_array("
> SELECT quote FROM quotes LIMIT 1, $random_id
> ");
>
> --
> Jeff
>
