Question

I’m trying to figure out the correct function in PHP to sort a multidimensional array. I considered doing a foreach and then using ksort (this didn’t work). I think it might be useful to note that the secondary keys (the numeric ones) are “manually” set (instead of using array_push since the first key in that scenario would be 0 instead of 1).

This is for a single instance so I don’t need a class for this or anything super-special, I’m interested in the correct-context function in PHP to make this bit of code more performance oriented (as well as to figure out what I’m doing wrong).

Note I want to keep the PRIMARY keys (e,g, Main and Promotional) their current order.

The unsorted array…

Array
(
    [Main] => Array
        (
            [3] => Main2
            [2] => Content
            [1] => Main1
        )

    [Promotional] => Array
        (
            [3] => Promotional1
            [2] => Content
            [1] => Promotional2
        )

)

The desired outcome (sorting by second-level key)…

Array
(
    [Main] => Array
        (
            [1] => Main1
            [2] => Content
            [3] => Main2
        )

    [Promotional] => Array
        (
            [1] => Promotional2
            [2] => Content
            [3] => Promotional1
        )

)

Answer 1

You could also try this:

foreach($array as $key => &$data) {
  ksort($data);
}

the ampersand before the $data variable indicates that the $data variable is a pointer, and any changes to that variable will cascade back to the original configuration.