Sorting PHP associative arrays

29 Sep 2011 | Posted by: Paul Whittington

There are times when you cannot sort the the order of a data set as you retrieve it from the database, and you need to sort it in script. The function below I wrote a long time ago but use all of the time.

Simply pass in the array, the array key you want to sort on, e.g. 

$customerArray = sortArrayByKey ($customerArray, "surname");

 

function sortArrayByKey ($key, $array, $desc=false){
    $sortArray = array();
    $returnArray = array();
    foreach ($array as $index=>$value) {
        $sortArray[$index] = $value[$key];
    }
    asort ($sortArray);
    foreach ($sortArray as $index=>$value) {
        $returnArray[] = $array[$index];
    }
    if ($desc) {
        return $returnArray = array_reverse($returnArray);
    } else {
        return ($returnArray);
    }
}

 

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