Sorting results by a priority list

[Anon]

I'm trying to order a list by another list. I have a page that pulls up say 10 records. I then limit the number displayed to 5. However, in those first five listings, I want certains records to appear first until I hit my maximum of 5 records.

Since it is world cup time, let's use a soccer example. I have a list of teams and I want to pull up all the teams that have a player named "John" on them. Easy enough.

Then I want the order of diplay to match my own personal bias. Once I get the ten records, I want to (sort? order? prioritize?) the results according to the value of one of the fields, say:

USA
England
Japan
Korea
Brazil

As you can see, it is not an alphabetical sort or descending order sort. Is there a way I can make a custom sort order and then have my results run against that sort order? Or is this just going to be one massive series of IF statements prioritizing my output?

[Anon]

You want to use usort().

Lessee - have an array indexed by field and containing the priorities

$priority['USA'] = 4
$priority['England'] = 4
$priority['Brazil'] = 5

Etc.

Then the usort function then uses a comparison function that looks like
compare_priority($a,$b)
{ global $priority; //I'm assuming you're using this array elsewhere as well.

if($priority[$a]<$priority[$b]) return -1;
if($priority[$a]>$priority[$b]) return 1;
return 0;
}

Then actually sorting the array would be done by

usort($list,'compare_priority');

I think. Better check the manual. Too tired to test (Me? Test? I never test these things.)