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In our last video we created our
own function called get item HTML.

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This allows us to get HTML for
a specific item for our list.

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Currently our home page loops through
each of the items in the catalog.

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Just like the catalog page.

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Instead of the entire
catalog we want to pull four

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random products to suggest to our user.

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To do that,
we're gonna use a built-in PHP function.

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PHP offers an number
of built-in functions.

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The PHP Docs are a great place to look for
things that you want to do, and

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it gives you the exact syntax that you
need to use to make these functions work.

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Let's check it out.

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As you can see there are quite
a few functions available, and

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I'd encourage you to play
around with them yourself.

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We'll use a couple more of these
built in functions later on.

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For now, we're looking for
a function called array_rand.

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Clicking on that function gives you
the details of that function and

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how to use it.

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Just like the function we created,

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the array_rand function takes two
parameters and returns a value.

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The first parameter is the array and

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the second parameter is the number
of elements we want to grab.

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Looking at return values,
we see that if only one item is returned,

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it returns that single key element.

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If multiple items are returned,
it puts the key into an array.

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Let's try this out in our own code.

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Let's go into index.php.

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We're going to create a new.

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Random variable.

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We'll assign this the return

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value of array_rand.

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We pass in our catalog and the number four
is the number of items we want to return.

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Let's do a var_dump to
check out these results.

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The var_dump command will display
all the possible information about

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a particular variable on the screen.

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You can see in the browser that
the new random variable is an array,

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with four elements,
that contain the random keys from

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our catalog array, 102, 103, 104 and 303.

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To use this we're going to use our for
each loop again but

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this time we're going to just grab
each key from our random array.

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Let's go back into index.php,
let's remove our var_dump.

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And instead of catalog we
want to just do random as id.

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Then in our get_item_html,
we'll pass the id, but instead of item,

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we're gonna use our catalogue,
and we'll pass in our id.

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Now, when we save this page and
refresh it in our browser,

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we'll see that four items are selected.

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When we refresh again,
we see another random four items.

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Great job, you've used the PHP
docs to learn about and

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use built-in functions that make our
job as programmers a lot easier.

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In the next video, we'll discuss how to
pull specific items from our catalog.

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In this case the category we specify.