Ordering ASCII problems

jc94062

When you order by Ascii...

Alien comes before alien

so if your trying to sort a member list, by alphabetical order, this can really mess you up, say you have 5 names (real unpopular site!)

Ardvard
beatip
kiryue
Rseop
Zonium

it gets ordered as below...

Ardvard
Rseop
Zonium
beatip
kiryue

now, to me this is fairly annoying, so I thought about the function in PHP that converts all to uppercase, (or lowercase) and other than the fact that I can't remember it, I realised it wasn't going to be any use...

As I am using an array, I don't have much in the way or ordering, I can't use something like

SELECT name from members ORDER by order_list

as all I have in a single variable, say its
$username, so theres no point, as far as I know, trying to covert it into all uppercase, and then ordering the array by $username_order or something similar.

Anyways, I hope that makes some kind of sense, just wondering if anyone can think of a solution to this...

Someone mentioned uksort, but the example they gave me included ucase, which doesn't seem to be a PHP function.

Thanks again for any help

maxholman

You could use natcasesort() which the manual describes as a case insensitive "natural order" algorithm

For example:
<?php

$names = array('Ardvard','beatip','kiryue','Rseop','Zonium');

natcasesort($names);

while (list($key,$val) = each($names)) {
print "$key:$val<BR>";
}

Would output:

0:Ardvard
1:beatip
2:kiryue
3:Rseop
4:Zonium

jc94062

Hmmm, well it certainly should do that, for me though it seperates the two arrays (merged before) and orders by the IDs!

Code below.

$username2 = mysql_query("SELECT name FROM table1",$db);
while ($user2=mysql_fetch_array($username2)) {
$name1 = $user2["name"];
$users1[] = "$name1";
}
$username3 = mysql_query("SELECT name FROM table2",$db);
while ($user3=mysql_fetch_array($name3)) {
$name2 = $user3["name"];
$users2[] = "$name2";
}
$username4 = array_merge($users1, $users2);
natcasesort($username4);
$arraysize = count($username4);
?>