Question

Solved. Thanks for everyone who helped with it by answers or comments and especially for those who spent couple of minutes typing some written explanations with their code so I actually got what is happening 🙂

Just some newbie php question. I have troubles in solving how to make this working. Basically I just want to sort menu by price, which includes only the name and the price.

Menu.txt looks like this:

Meat,1
Salad,3
Juice,2

But after running the program it echoes:

Array Array
Array Array
Array Array

And I would like to have it printed like:

Meat,1
Juice,2
Salad,3

Which makes me think I cant use variables in array() just like that so I wonder how I should actually do it? Code is down below and everything else works well in my program except sorting by price (if I just print .txt file without trying to sort is goes fine etc..)

<?php
if (file_exists("menu.txt"))
{
    $lines = file("menu.txt");
    $howmanylines = count($lines);
    for($i=0; $i < $lines; $i++) {
        $oneline = explode(",",$lines[$i]);
        $name = $oneline[0];
        $price = $oneline[1];
        $sortingbyprice = array(
            array($name),
            array($price)
        );
        array_multisort($sortingbyprice[0], $sortingbyprice[1], SORT_NUMERIC, SORT_ASC);
        echo $sortingbyprice[0] . " ";
        echo $sortingbyprice[1] . "<br/>";
    }
}

Answer 1

You’re inputting arrays into an array and sorting everytime you input a new value into the array.

This code doesn’t: first it iterates through the file, adding the menu items to an associative array using the following format: $sortingbyprice[product] = price. Then it sorts the array and loops through the sorted array, generating an output (which, of course, can be altered to suit your needs).

To sort in ascending order:

<?php
if (file_exists("menu.txt"))
{
    $lines = file("menu.txt");
    $sortingbyprice = array();

    foreach ($lines as $line)
    {
        $oneline = explode(",", $line);
        $sortingbyprice[$oneline[0]] = $oneline[1];
    }

    // Sort the array, maintaining key associations.
    asort($sortingbyprice, SORT_NUMERIC);

    foreach ($sortingbyprice as $product=>$price)
    {
        echo $product." ".$price."<br />";
    }
}
?>

If you would like to sort in descending order, you can use

    // Sort the array, maintaining key associations.
    arsort($sortingbyprice, SORT_NUMERIC);

In short: asort() for ascending sorts, arsort() for descending sorts.