Question

How would one sort an indexed array and maintain the index association in Actionscript 3.0. The Array.sort(); method seems to reindex the array no matter what. Basically I need to recreate the arsort php function in Actionscript. Possible?

Answer 1

To do so you would need an associative array (i.e. an Object) because when the indexes are integers flash would automatically reorder them from 0 to n as you may have noticed (This can be quite annoying in your case, but has its reasons).

If you want to keep track of the key values, a hack is to store the indexes in the value for each item in the array :

var array:Object = new Array();  array.push({index:0,name:'Tom'}); array.push({index:1,name:'Andrew'}); array.push({index:2,name:'Mark'});  array.sortOn('name');  for each(var item:Object in array)     trace(item.index, item.name); 

This will trace :

1 Andrew  2 Mark  0 Tom 

n.b. This can be improved if your values are strong typed in a Vector instead of an Array.