Comments on: Build a Buzzword Bingo Card in PHP

By: Robert K

Robert K — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:13:48 +0000

Brilliant! Perhaps accumulate a large list and stick it in a database? The you can print off multiple 10’s of sheets for everyone but the presenter to have a go :P

By: joro6430

joro6430 — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:09:41 +0000

Mmmmm I can answer my own question now. It’s the usual story of pilot error I’m afraid. I messed up the array by omitting a comma on one of the buzz phrases. When that phrase was absent the software was fine, and now works great with lots of buzz phrases. As Dilbert has it, never underestimate the extent of human stupidity.

By: joro6430

joro6430 — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 13:52:05 +0000

Thanks Raena – that worked just fine. Very amusing. However it broke when I added more words to the array. It performs as presented up to 29 words in the array, but crashes with 30 or more words. Can’t see anything wrong with your logic, is it the shuffle() function causing the bug? I cut out your code and substituted
shuffle($buzzwords);

$count=1;
foreach ($buzzwords as $word) {
echo “$count $word, “;
$count++;
}
and this misbehaved similarly – breaking at the array size 30 words barrier. Anybody seen this (mis)behaviour before?

By: Nathan

Nathan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 01:28:55 +0000

Liking the bingo card. I'm learning PHP myself actually and finding it an interesting language. Posting to PHPmule.com/blog. Will be trying to learn more stuff like this in the future!

By: ghydle

ghydle — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:50:20 +0000

that was fun – more of these fun examples please!!

By: CamCrow

CamCrow — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 01:55:15 +0000

Our staff did this (at my school) back in the fall; our principal gave us a sheet with a whole bunch of ministry/board terms (some would say BS as is listed above) at the top, and we were to put them in random boxes in a 5×5 grid. I’m our school’s webmaster, if I had this tool I could’ve generated a random sheet for each teacher! ;-)

By: xxparanormalxx

xxparanormalxx — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 13:02:21 +0000

greatness.

By: Lawrence Okpor

Lawrence Okpor — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:36:39 +0000

To DuleyNoted,
You should save the first example as ‘bingo.php’ and the 2nd example with any name but it should have a .php extension. That should do it. If you have a problem mail me at lawokp@yahoo.com

By: Courtney

Courtney — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:03:19 +0000

okay, lil challenge (and I’m not a programmer but I understand some logic)

75 words, with 15 available randomly in each column.

I host “indie rock bingo” and simply paste stickers of items randomly on bingo cards, and call them out as randomly as I humanly can, but I’d like to eventually move to a bingo generator with pictures (simple enough right, insert jpgs in the array?) where each icon corresponds to an actual bingo # and I can use my bingo cage.

By: raena

raena — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:20:17 +0000

@DuleyNoted, My Documents isn't usually a place where PHP can execute. Try using a regular web server. Also, for a PHP inclusion to work properly, you need to either tell your web server to make .html files executable by PHP, or change bingo.html to something else with .php at the end. So I'm not sure your bingo.html file will work unless you do one of those things. If you don't have a web server, try out XAMPP. It has Apache, PHP, MySQL, lots of other goodies, and runs locally right there on your machine. Free!