How to sort values with special chars in array?

Question

First, I set the proper locale to spanish:

setlocale(LC_ALL, 'es_ES');

This array holds a list of languages which must be reordered alphabetically.

$lang['ar'] = 'árabe';
$lang['fr'] = 'francés';
$lang['de'] = 'alemán';

So I do this:

asort($lang,SORT_LOCALE_STRING);

The final result is:

alemán
francés
árabe

...and it should be:

árabe
alemán
francés

The asort() function is sending the á character to the bottom of the ordered list. How can I avoid this issue? Thanks!

Solution linked by @Sbls

function compareASCII($a, $b) {
    $at = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $a);
    $bt = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $b);
    return strcmp($at, $bt);
}
uasort($lang, 'compareASCII');

wouldnt `ksort` work for you? I sorts the keys instead of the values. — Sbls, Jan 04 '14 at 18:18
@Sbls That's won't work in my case. I have several language packs, the keys always stay the same, but the values won't. I always need to order by value. — Andres SK, Jan 04 '14 at 18:19
possible dublicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10649473/sort-an-array-with-special-characters-in-php Can you work with that question thread? — Sbls, Jan 04 '14 at 18:20
One thing I see, is that you are setting the values of `$lang`, but sorting `$list['translate']`, is that the same array? — Alex Siri, Jan 04 '14 at 18:22
AlexSiri: It wouldn't sort at all. Maybe a typo. @andufo: The whole thing works for me though. Well, árabe comes after alemán for me. But it doesn't come last. — Sbls, Jan 04 '14 at 18:25

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 04 '14 at 18:26

1

Try using Collator::asort from the intl module:

<?php
$collator = collator_create('es_ES');
$collator->asort($array);

answered Jan 04 '14 at 18:26

ChrisGPT was on strike

127,765
105
273
257

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 04 '14 at 18:20

It is likely that the comparison checks the multibyte value of the character, and á in that case is probably greater than z, so it will show afterwards. If you want a comparison that does not take that into account, I see two possibilites:

Sort using uasort and create your own comparison function.
Generate a mapping from the ascii version of your strings, to the real one, and sort on the keys.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 27 '14 at 17:11

0

Solution linked by @Sbls in comments

function compareASCII($a, $b) {
    $at = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $a);
    $bt = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $b);
    return strcmp($at, $bt);
}
uasort($lang, 'compareASCII');

answered Jan 27 '14 at 17:11

Andres SK

10,779
25
90
152

How to sort values with special chars in array?

3 Answers3

Linked