Laravel 4 How to pick random language string? - php

Question

I am using Laravel 4 and I am creating an authentication app. I am stuck in a very small feature I want to implement but for me it's needed. When the user logs in I want to display a random array of "greetings" like "Howdly, username" or "Hey there, username" etc. from my language file. Is there any way I could do that?
I tried something like that:
{{ array_rand(trans('en.greetings') }}
But it displays the variable given for each string instead (for example hey_there which should be "Hey there")
My array:
"greetings" => array(
"howdly" => "Howdly",
"hello" => "Hello",
"hello_there" => "Hello there",
"hey" => "Hey",
"arr" => "Arr"
),

Answer 1

You could just shuffle the array each time and print the first index
//I am creating an array here, but you could assign whatever
$greetings = array(
"howdly" => "Howdly",
"hello" => "Hello",
"hello_there" => "Hello there",
"hey" => "Hey",
"arr" => "Arr"
);
shuffle($greetings);
echo reset($greetings); //will print the first value, you can return it or assgn it to a variable etc

Answer 2

I had the similar use case where I had to give random string back to the user. I'm using Laravel 5, and this is how I solved it. Your language file could look like this:
return[
"greeting_1"=>"myString 1",
"greeting_2"=>"myString 2",
"greeting_3"=>"myString 3",
];
I added a custom helper to my application and wrote a helper method to choose a response in random. My method looks like this:
function getRandomPrompt($key,$params=array()){
$key=explode(".",$key);
if(count($key)!= 2)
throw new Exception("Invalid language key format");
$file=$key[0];
$msgKey=$key[1];
//Get all the keys of the file
$keys_from_file=Lang::get($file);
//Filter all the prompts with this key
foreach ($keys_from_file as $file_key=>$value){
$key_parts=explode("_",$file_key);
if(($key_parts[0])!==$msgKey)
unset($keys_from_file[$file_key]);
}
$selected_key=array_rand($keys_from_file);
if(count($keys_from_file)>=1)
return Lang::get($file.".".$selected_key,$params);
else
return($file.".".$msgKey);
}
This helper simply looks for all possible keys, and return one string in random. You can also pass a parameter array to it. Now, whenever you want a string, you can get it by calling:getRandomPrompt("filename.greeting")

Answer 3

Was looking for something like this, but eventually I found another solution.
In your lang file:
return [
'String',
'Thong',
'Underwhere?',
];
Your blade solution:
{{ __('messages')[array_rand(__('messages'))] }}