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PHP How can I alphabetically sort second dimension of an array

I´m trying to sort the last dimension of the following array

$inventory = array(
    "author" => array(
        "1" => "Evans, Dave",
        "2" => "Burnett, Bill",
    ),
    "title" => array(
        "1" => "Designing your life",
    ),
    "subject" => array(
        "1" => "Vocational guidance",
        "2" => "Decision making",
        "3" => "Self-realization",
    )
);

The desired output would be something like this:

author  Burnett, Bill
author  Evans, Dave
title   Designing your life
subject Decision making
subject Self-realization
subject Vocational guidance

There are a bunch of sorting examples that doesn’t work. Any ideas? Please don’t answer without testing.

Tags:

2

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    Thanks RJK (and Rob Eyre) for this usefull answer. I have come to this solution, using asort within a for loop.

    $keys = array_keys($inventory);
for ($i = 0; $i < count($inventory); $i++) {
    asort($inventory[$keys[$i]]); 
    foreach($inventory[$keys[$i]] as $key => $value) {
        echo $keys[$i]."&emsp;".$value."<br />";
    }
}
echo "<br />";

    But I think the array_walk solution is more professional. Thanks.


  2. 0

    You can do either of the following:

    1. Ignoring index association (as commented by Rob):
    array_walk($inventory, function(&$v, $k) {
    sort($v);
});

    var_dump returns:

    array(3) {
  ["author"]=>
  array(2) {
    [0]=>
    string(13) "Burnett, Bill"
    [1]=>
    string(11) "Evans, Dave"
  }
  ["title"]=>
  array(1) {
    [0]=>
    string(19) "Designing your life"
  }
  ["subject"]=>
  array(3) {
    [0]=>
    string(15) "Decision making"
    [1]=>
    string(16) "Self-realization"
    [2]=>
    string(19) "Vocational guidance"
  }
}
    1. Maintaining index association:
    array_walk($inventory, function(&$v, $k) {
    asort($v);
});

    var_dump returns:

    array(3) {
  ["author"]=>
  array(2) {
    [2]=>
    string(13) "Burnett, Bill"
    [1]=>
    string(11) "Evans, Dave"
  }
  ["title"]=>
  array(1) {
    [1]=>
    string(19) "Designing your life"
  }
  ["subject"]=>
  array(3) {
    [2]=>
    string(15) "Decision making"
    [3]=>
    string(16) "Self-realization"
    [1]=>
    string(19) "Vocational guidance"
  }
}

    Note that both of these solutions will change the type of your indexes from string to int.

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