phparrayssortingnatural-sort

Sort an array of filepath strings naturally

I have this array:

Array (
    [0] => ../files/flv/1
    [1] => ../files/flv/10
    [2] => ../files/flv/2
    [3] => ../files/flv/3
    [4] => ../files/flv/4
    [5] => ../files/flv/5
    [6] => ../files/flv/6
    [7] => ../files/flv/7
    [8] => ../files/flv/8
    [9] => ../files/flv/9
)

I need to sort it this way:

Array (
    [0] => ../files/flv/1
    [1] => ../files/flv/2
    [2] => ../files/flv/3
    [3] => ../files/flv/4
    [4] => ../files/flv/5
    [5] => ../files/flv/6
    [6] => ../files/flv/7
    [7] => ../files/flv/8
    [8] => ../files/flv/9
    [9] => ../files/flv/10
)

I tried to use sort($array,SORT_NUMERIC);, but no luck because of this prefix ../files/flv/

I know only this solution: $array2 = array_map('basename', $array); and then sort($array2,SORT_NUMERIC);

Is there any other solutions not so complex?

Solution

  • Use SORT_NATURAL instead of SORT_NUMERIC (requires PHP 5.4.0 or latest):

    sort($array, SORT_NATURAL);

    EDIT: I used this code to test it:

    $array = array(
  '../files/flv/1',
  '../files/flv/10',
  '../files/flv/2'
);

sort($array, SORT_NATURAL);
print_r($array);

    It outputs:

    Array
(
    [0] => ../files/flv/1
    [1] => ../files/flv/2
    [2] => ../files/flv/10
)

    EDIT 2: Alternatively you can use the natsort() function, it works on older versions too:

    natsort($array);