Re: arrays & lists

[Octavian Rasnita]

First I need to tell you that I am not a MySQL specialist and my opinion
might be wrong butI think that:

1. You'll better use where day=$day and where month=$month because it works
faster than using the "like" operator.

2. I think MySQL has a function for returning random numbers, so you better
use that function instead.
It will return a single row that match a criteria from the database and not
a lot of records that need to be processed by Perl after that.
You might check MySQL documentation for finding out this function.

What you want, I think that it can be made with a single SQL line and you
will need to get the data from a single row using Perl.

Teddy,
Teddy's Center: http://teddy.fcc.ro/
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Al Hospers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 11:03 PM
Subject: arrays & lists


hi

I know I am missing a lot in my knowledge, but I'm trying to figure
something out & seemingly am in a hole...

the task is as follows:

1) query a mysql database for as many records as match a criteria
(I can do this OK)

2) put the resulting records, how ever many there are, into a list or an
array

3) count the number of records I have retrived
(I can do this OK)

4) choose a random record number
(I can do this)

5) get the record corresponding to the random record number from the array

6) get a particular field from the stored record

I am using DBI to get the data from the database. here is what I have so
far:

sub getRandomRecord{
  my $cgi = shift;
  my $dbh = shift;
  my $month = shift;
  my $day = shift;

  my $searchResult;
  my $returnValue;

   #prepare and execute SQL statement
    $sqlstatement = "SELECT * FROM $TABLE WHERE month like $month and day
like $day";
    $sth = executeSQLStatement($sqlstatement, $dbh);

   $counter = 0;

   # put the records returned in an array/list & count how many
    while ($searchResult = $sth->fetchrow_array() )
    {
    # get the 4th field from the record in the array & put it in the list
    my @list = ($searchResult[3]);
     ++$counter;
   }

    # pass the counter to the random integer routine & get a value back
    my $randomNumber = getRandomNumber($counter);

    $returnValue = @list[$randomNumber];

   # clean up the DBI
   $sth->finish();

   return $returnValue
   }




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