Question

I would like to be able to sort this array by the element array’s size;

array( 
    [0] =>  array( [0] => 'B',  [1] => 'C');
    [1] =>  array( [0] => 'B');
    [2] =>  array( [0] => 'A', [1] =>  'C');
    [3] =>  array( [0] => 'A', [1] =>  'B', [2] =>  'C');
    [4] =>  array( [0] => 'C');       
    [5] =>  array( [0] => 'A');
    [6] =>  array( [0] => 'A', [1] =>  'B');
   )

array( 
    [0] =>  array( [0] => 'A');
    [1] =>  array( [0] => 'B');
    [2] =>  array( [0] => 'C');
    [3] =>  array( [0] => 'A', [1] =>  'B');
    [4] =>  array( [0] => 'A', [1] =>  'C');
    [5] =>  array( [0] => 'B',  [1] => 'C');
    [6] =>  array( [0] => 'A', [1] =>  'B', [2] =>  'C');
)

Answer 1

You can do this in 2 steps.

• In step 1, sort individual arrays on
  value.
• In step 2, sort the 2D array, first
  based on size and if the size are not
  equal sort on the values.

Code:

foreach($input as $key => $val) {
        sort($input[$key]);
}
usort($input, "cmp");
print_r($input);

function cmp($a,$b) {
        if(count($a) != count($b)) {
                return count($a) - count($b);
        }
        for($i=0;$i<count($a);$i++) {
                if($a[$i] != $b[$i]) {
                        return strcmp($a[$i],$b[$i]);
                }
        }
        return 0;
}

Code in Action