Generate a random number with a seed between a range in ruby

Question

I'm trying to get the banner image on my website to change once a day. I can see ruby has srand which will let me input a number for the date and return the same result every time it is called on the same day but this returns a very long number. I also saw rand lets me use a range like rand(a..b).

Is there any way I can use srand with a range like I can with rand?

Answer 1

You can create a special/designated random number generator with any seed value you like:

special = Random.new 42 # create a new instance of Random seeded with 42
20.times { p special.rand(5..10) } # generate 20 random ints in range 5 to 10

Your special instance of Random is independent of kernel#rand unless you use srand to initialize it with the same seed value.