PHP Number Ticket System? - php

Question

So, I'm trying to make a ticket system. So a users will be assigned 1000 tickets each, I will then generate a number from 1 to 5000, I then need it to select the user.
The way I have done it was made an array then looped 5000 times and assigned each user a ticket, however this doesn't work with really big numbers like 5,000,000. So I'm trying to think of the best way to do this and I'm unsure how.
Any advice?
$users = array();
$ticketNum = 0;
$result = $MySQL->query("SELECT * FROM `users` ");
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()){
$i = 0;
while($i < $row['points']){
$i++;
$ticketNum++;
$ar = array("ticketNum" => $ticketNum, "username" => $row['username']);
array_push($users, $ar);
}
}
$winningTicket = 2500;
foreach($players as $ar){
if($winningTicket == $ar['ticketNum']){
//winner
}
}

Answer 1

I'll need more code to suggest a perfect solution, and also know why you want to assign 1000 tickets to a person?
But you could assign a from-to key instead of looping ALL of the numbers through, like
$users[$userNumber]["from"] = 1;
$users[$userNumber]["to"] = 6;
$findNumber = rand(1,6);
$foundUser = false;
foreach($users as $userNumber => $user) {
if ($user["from"] <= $findNumber && $user["to"] >= $findNumber) {
$foundUser = $user;
break;
}
}
if ($foundUser) {
print "Hooray, someone just got a ticket.";
}
but it does sound like a job you would solve in a different manner, maybe through your database.
Edit: I wrote the above before you added your code example, In your case I would probably do the following.
$result = $MySQL->query("SELECT username FROM users ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1");
$winningUser = $result->fetch_assoc();
print "We got a winner: ".$winningUser["username"];