Question

I am fairly new to php and would love to hear your thoughts on this function I just wrote.
The idea is to sort an array of files chronologically from oldest to newest. Take a look and let me know if you think it can be improved at all:

function sortByDate($filearray){
    $OAR = array();
    foreach($filearray as $item){
        $OAR[filemtime($item)] = $item;
        }
    ksort($OAR);
    return explode(" * ", implode(" * ", $OAR ));
    }

Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

If more than one file has the same mtime, it will overwrite that file from your $OAR array. Instead store each value as an array of files to solve that issue.

And this statement return explode(" * ", implode(" * ", $OAR )); seems like it can just be replace with return array_values($OAR); With the above adjustment I mentioned, you may have to loop over the $OAR array and push each set of values to a new array and return that instead.

EDIT: here is an example.

function sortByDate($filearray){
    $OAR = array();
    $sorted = array();

    foreach($filearray as $item){
        $mtime = filemtime($item);
        if (!isset($OAR[$mtime])) $OAR[$mtime] = array();

        $OAR[$mtime][] = $item;  // push $item to the array for this mtime
    }

    ksort($OAR);

    foreach($OAR as $key => $values) {
        if (sizeof($values) > 1) sort($values); // sort by name
        foreach($values as $file) {
            $return[] = $file;
        }
    }

    return $return;
}