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up vote 4 down vote favorite

I have an array

Array
(
[Warranty Terms] => Array
    (
        [value] => "2 years limited global "
        [priority] => 50
    )

[Processor] => Array
    (
        [value] => "Intel® Core™ i3-2350M Processor"
        [priority] => 0
    )

[Memory] => Array
    (
        [value] => "standard : 4,096 MB maximum expandability : 8,192 MB"
        [priority] => 1
    )

)

I need to sort it by priority from lowest. Finally I want to get an array like this:

Array
(
[Processor] => "Intel® Core™ i3-2350M Processor"
[Memory] => "standard : 4,096 MB maximum expandability : 8,192 MB"
[Warranty Terms] => "2 years limited global"
)

How can I apply sorting?

share|improve this question
2  
Read –  Madara Uchiha Mar 15 '12 at 8:56
    
possible duplicate of PHP sort multidimensional array by value –  jensgram Mar 15 '12 at 8:57

3 Answers 3

up vote 8 down vote accepted 
uasort($array, function ($a, $b) { return $a['priority'] - $b['priority']; });
$array = array_map(function ($i) { return $i['value']; }, $array);
share|improve this answer
3  
It needs at least PHP 5.3 for anonymous functions to work. :) –  deceze Mar 15 '12 at 9:01
    
Nice one on using the array_map function for removing the priority from the array. –  Steven Don Mar 15 '12 at 9:03
    
@deceze A little update to your solution, I need a uasort() function, because usort drops "Processor", "Memory" indexes. –  Justinas Lelys Mar 15 '12 at 9:15
    
@Justinas True that. –  deceze Mar 15 '12 at 9:29
up vote 4 down vote

That's what the uasort function is for: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.usort.php

function cmp ($a, $b)
{
    //Priority is first sort criterion
    if ($a ['priority'] != $b ['priority']) return $a ['priority'] - $b ['priority'];
    //Text string is second criterion (in case of two equal priorities)
    return strcmp ($a ['value'], $b ['value']);
}

uasort ($arr, cmp);

If you then also want the priority to disappear from the array, just do that yourself:

$new = array ();
foreach ($arr as $k => $v)
{
    $new [$k] = $b ['value'];
}

Edit: Updated to uasort (thanks Justina Lelys)

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1  
A little update to your solution, I need a uasort() function, because usort drops "Processor", "Memory" indexes. –  Justinas Lelys Mar 15 '12 at 9:16
up vote 0 down vote

The usort() based solutions that have been posted are arguably better than this and you should accept one of them, but for completeness I will show you how it can be done with array_multisort():

// First we create an array which holds just the data from the priority 'column'
$sortArr = array();
foreach ($array as $row) $sortArr[] = $row['priority'];

// Next we call array_multisort()
array_multisort($sortArr, SORT_ASC, $array);

// Now we convert the sorted array to just the values
foreach ($array as &$row) $row = $row['value'];

print_r($array);
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