Question

Would appreciate any help with this.:)

I have the following text file:

roomA     Springer, Jerry    [e-mail]
roomB     Cruise, Tom        [e-mail]
roomC     Jovi, Bon          [e-mail]

and I want to sort it by the surname so it outputs:

Cruise, Tom      roomB        [e-mail]
Jovi, Bon        roomC        [e-mail]
Springer, Jerry  roomA        [e-mail]

I know how to load the file:

$a = file("details.txt");

and think I have to use explode() to split up the data (tab-seperated):

$array = explode("\t", $a);

this makes the name the second element in the array.

How do I put the string back together with the name coming first, followed by the room and email?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Do a var_dump($array) and it will display you the indexes. You then only need to swap two elements with each other. Here is a trick:

list($array[0], $array[1]) = array($array[1], $array[0]);

After that, you can implode the result as you did explode it:

$line = implode("\t", $array);

Hope this is helpful. Ah well, and for sorting, take a look at array_multisort.