natsort / sort problem

[bobcooper]

Hi there I have an annoying problem.

I have an array of values as follows:

Fashion 1
Fashion 5
Fashion 10
Fashion 3
Fashion 2
Fashion 4 etc

I want to sort them via alphabetical and numeric order so I used natsort however this gave the following result:

Fashion 1
Fashion 10
Fashion 2
Fashion 3
Fashion 4
Fashion 5 etc

But I want to display it as follows

Fashion 1
Fashion 2
Fashion 3
Fashion 4
Fashion 5
Fashion 6
Fashion 7
Fashion 8
Fashion 9
Fashion 10

i.e. like a human would order it numerically. I have read up and discovered that natsort has problems with spaces and underscores so was wondering if anyone knew a work around to order things naturally (preferably without removing the spaces from the entries, but if necessary they can be remove then re-added after.

Thanks for your help,
Bob

[Undrium]

Use this instead:

usort($arr, 'strnatcmp');

Wheres strnatcmp is the function which makes this comparison in a more human-like manner.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.usort.php
http://php.net/manual/en/function.strnatcmp.php

[NogDog]

[man]natsort/man worked fine for me, and gave identical results to using usort($array, 'strnatcmp'). Maybe a PHP version issue? (I tested using PHP 5.2.4 -- yeah, a bit old, but close to what my hosting company uses. :rolleyes: )

<pre><?php
$test1 = $test2 = array(
   'Fashion 1',
   'Fashion 5',
   'Fashion 10',
   'Fashion 3',
   'Fashion 2',
   'Fashion 4'
);
?>UNSORTED:
<?php
print_r($test1);
print_r($test2);
?>
SORTED:
<?php
natsort($test1);
usort($test2, 'strnatcmp');
print_r($test1);
print_r($test2);
?></pre>

Output:

UNSORTED:
Array
(
    [0] => Fashion 1
    [1] => Fashion 5
    [2] => Fashion 10
    [3] => Fashion 3
    [4] => Fashion 2
    [5] => Fashion 4
)
Array
(
    [0] => Fashion 1
    [1] => Fashion 5
    [2] => Fashion 10
    [3] => Fashion 3
    [4] => Fashion 2
    [5] => Fashion 4
)
SORTED:
Array
(
    [0] => Fashion 1
    [4] => Fashion 2
    [3] => Fashion 3
    [5] => Fashion 4
    [1] => Fashion 5
    [2] => Fashion 10
)
Array
(
    [0] => Fashion 1
    [1] => Fashion 2
    [2] => Fashion 3
    [3] => Fashion 4
    [4] => Fashion 5
    [5] => Fashion 10
)

PS: Don't forget [man]natcasesor/man if you need the sorting to be case-insensitive.

[bobcooper]

Thanks so much for the replies, Undrium's solution worked, not sure why the natsort was not working, all part of the fun of web design i guess.

Cheers,
Bob