Question

I have an array:

$a = array("Freshman Spring" => 3, "Freshman Winter" => 2, "Freshman Summer" => 4, "Freshman Fall" => 1); 

There will be different arrays for each school year, but no array will mix years such as fre, soph.

My issue is that I need to sort this array by the way seasons happen in school (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer). I tried using uksort but my code there actually accomplishes nothing since it’d sort the same way regardless.

function cmp($a, $b) {
    $a = preg_replace('@^(freshman|sophomore|junior|senior) @', '', $a);
    $b = preg_replace('@^(freshman|sophomore|junior|senior) @', '', $b);
    return strcasecmp($a, $b);
}

uksort($a, "cmp");

I get this:

Array
(
    [Freshman Fall] => 1
    [Freshman Spring] => 3
    [Freshman Summer] => 4
    [Freshman Winter] => 2
)

but need to get this:

Array
(
    [Freshman Fall] => 1
    [Freshman Winter] => 2
    [Freshman Spring] => 3
    [Freshman Summer] => 4
)

Is uksort the way to go? and what am I doing wrong? Keep in mind that the array values will not be those values, they will hold objects. Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Why not use the value as the key {1,2,3,4} and store the “object” as the value. Makes sorting really easy…

You can always map the {1,2,3,4} to defines or class consts if you want pretty names.