Housie Tickets Generator in PHP

This PHP script generates housie tickets using Emojis instead of numbers. Each ticket has 3 rows with 9 columns of which 4 are blanks and the rest have unique but random emoji emoticons.

The emojis are rendered using 160x160 images extracted from the Apple Emoji font and would therefore render on any browser and device.

function createTicket() {

    // There are so many Emoji emoticons
    $numbers = range(1,846);
    shuffle ( $numbers );

    // Each ticket has 3 rows and each row has 4 blank spaces
    $row = [ ["", "", "", ""], ["", "", "", ""], ["", "", "", ""] ];

    // Each row has 5 numbers (or emojis)
    for ($i=0; $i<sizeof($row); $i++) {
        for ($j=0; $j<5; $j++) {
            array_push($row[$i],$numbers[$i*5+$j]);
        }
        // Let's shuffle to maintain randomness
        shuffle($row[$i]);
    }

    $table = "";

    // The emoji images are hosted in a sub-folder
    for ($i=0; $i<sizeof($row); $i++) {
        $table .= "<tr>";
        for ($j=0; $j<9; $j++) {
            $img = $row[$i][$j] == "" ? "white.gif" : $row[$i][$j] . ".png";
            $table .= "<td width=160 height=160><img src='emoji/$img' width=160 height=160/></td>";
        }
        $table .= "</tr>";
    }

    $table = "<table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=10 border=2>$table</table>";

    return $table;
}

$html =  "";

// Generate 2x5 tickets per sheet
for ($i=0; $i<5; $i++) {
    $html .= "<tr><td>" . createTicket() . "</td><td>" . createTicket() . "</td></tr>";
}

echo "<table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=40 border=0>$html</table>";
?>

Amit Agarwal is a web geek, solo entrepreneur and loves making things on the Internet. Google recently awarded him the Google Developer Expert and Google Cloud Champion title for his work on Google Workspace and Google Apps Script.

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