PHP selecting only 4 from multidimensional array and shuffling - php

Question

I have the following PHP multidimensional array, I'm looking to try select 4 random items and then show them with the title, image and text. With the code I've used I seem to get a single number which is randomized and not what I need.
<?php
$arr = array(
array(
"image" => "",
"title" => "Open 7 days.",
"text" => "We’re open 7 days a week."
),
array(
"image" => "",
"title" => "Well done",
"text" => "Well done you done great."
),
array(
"image" => "",
"title" => "Rice",
"text" => "Various flavours"
),
array(
"image" => "",
"title" => "Rooms",
"text" => "Roomy rooms for a roomyful time"
),
array(
"image" => "",
"title" => "Keep in touch.",
"text" => "Stay in touchwith us as we'll miss you"
),
array(
"image" => "",
"title" => "Location",
"text" => "We'll show you where we are."
),
array(
"image" => "",
"title" => "The Home",
"text" => "See our home page"
)
);
print_r(array_rand($arr));

Answer 1

If you're picking only one entry, array_rand() returns a single key for a random entry. If you use the num to specify how many keys should be picked, then it returns num number of keys of random entries.
The function only returns the keys of the random entries and not the array chunks itself. You'll have to manually build the array from the returned keys:
// get the random keys
$keys = array_rand($arr, 4);
// initialize result array
$result = array();
// loop through the keys and build the array
foreach ($keys as $k) {
$result[] = $arr[$k];
}
print_r($result);
Update
From a quick benchmark, it seems array_rand() is signficantly faster than using shuffle() for larger arrays. The benchmark was done on an array having 14336 elements with 10000 iterations each.
The results obtained on my dev machine were as follows:
Number of elements in the array - 14336
Number of iterations for each method - 10000
array_rand() version took 4.659 seconds
shuffle() version took 15.071 seconds
The code used for benchmarking can be found in this gist.

Answer 2

No need to loop !
shuffle() and array_slice() does the job.
Simply shuffle your array such that it rearranges the entries , now pick the first 4 items using array_slice.
shuffle($arr);
print_r(array_slice($arr,0,4));
Demo

Answer 3

Read about the $num parameter array_rand()
print_r(array_rand($arr, 4));
To display all:
foreach(array_rand($arr, 4) as $key) {
echo $arr[$key]['text'] ."\n";
//etc
}