Counting entries

Hey everybody.
Been working on my personal site lately and decided to add a section, 'Random Hotties'.

The idea is to search the database for the number of entries, choose a random number and then show that image. My problem comes to counting how many entries are in the table I select.

I'm sure it's some really simple MySQL command, but I'm too tired to see it in Google. Any help would be appreciated, and I might not reply back quickly, I will be out of town and away from computers for about a week.

You can use this command to count the number of enteries:

$QUERY = mysql_query ( "SELECT * FROM TABLE" );
$COUNT = mysql_num_row( $QUERY );

It'd probably be easier to do something like the following:



This gives you a random id without requiring that you first do a count.

wouldnt this also work

Bruski, he's wanting a random number, not a count of the id in question. Also, conceivably, the row corresponding to a count of the id could possibly have been deleted, resulting in a display error. Mike_r's method is doable, but would require then taking the count and running a PHP function on it to get a random number not greater than that count. My query does all that work in one step.

Excellent, thanks guys. I'll try when I get home.