[RESOLVED] ordering records

[turtleton09]

I have a table of carpet designs, with references like Chinese 1, Chinese 2, Chinese 3 etc.

As these are text fields, they display in the order Chinese 1, Chinese 10, Chinese 11,... Chinese 2, etc

I need to have then as Chinese 1, Chinese 2, Chinese 3 etc

I was about to add in an extra field RefNo that would be an integer and just be the numeric part of the text ref, and would never be displayed but just be used to order the records. Which I presume will be fine, but just wondered if there was any way of doing it just with the existing field?

[stolzyboy]

<?php
$array = array(); // initialize array

// populating the array can be done in a loop, this is just a static example
$array[] = 'Chinese 1';
$array[] = 'Chinese 2';
$array[] = 'Chinese 6';
$array[] = 'Chinese 15';
$array[] = 'Chinese 3';
$array[] = 'Chinese 4';
$array[] = 'Chinese 14';
$array[] = 'Chinese 5';
$array[] = 'Chinese 20';
$array[] = 'Chinese 7';
$array[] = 'Chinese 12';
$array[] = 'Chinese 8';
$array[] = 'Chinese 9';
$array[] = 'Chinese 10';
$array[] = 'Chinese 11';
$array[] = 'Chinese 13';
$array[] = 'Chinese 16';
$array[] = 'Chinese 17';
$array[] = 'Chinese 18';
$array[] = 'Chinese 19';

natsort($array);

foreach($array as $value){
   echo $value . "<br>";
}
?>

this outputs:

Chinese 1
Chinese 2
Chinese 3
Chinese 4
Chinese 5
Chinese 6
Chinese 7
Chinese 8
Chinese 9
Chinese 10
Chinese 11
Chinese 12
Chinese 13
Chinese 14
Chinese 15
Chinese 16
Chinese 17
Chinese 18
Chinese 19
Chinese 20

hth,
stolzyboy

[turtleton09]

So how does that work exactly? Is it just telling it to ignore the text, and concentrate on any (numeric) value?

It's coming from a databse, so would have new records added - if you can help out with the syntax for putting it in a loop that would be great.

[stolzyboy]

the natsort() tells it to sort the array by a natural algorithm, it doesn't matter what order it comes from the db, the following would produce the same results, assuming you had the same values as i supplied statically, this is untested and may have parse errors, you can figure those out tho 😉

<?php 
$array = array(); // initialize array 

$query = "select blah blah your query";
$result = mysql_query($query);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
$array[] = $row['a_field_selected_from_query']; 
}

natsort($array); 

foreach($array as $value)
{ 
echo $value . "<br>"; 
} 
?>

[turtleton09]

OK - cheers - I'll have a go at that.