PHP Multi Dimensional Array Sorting

To fix the sorting, just add ORDER BY name, place

Then there's several more issues preventing this from working:

1. You shouldn't call mysql_fetch_array outside the loop (this would discard the first row, alpha london in your example).
2. You need to iterate over $rows, not $result (this is where the "invalid argument" error is coming from).
3. You're not echoing the value; only the key. So you wouldn't be displaying the name and place at all; only the words "name" and "place".

You might want to do something like this to fix these:

<?php
include('conn.php');
$sql = "SELECT * FROM test ORDER BY name, place";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
while ($rows = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
  foreach ($rows as $k => $v) {
    echo "$k is $v. ";
  }
  echo "<br/>";
}
?>

So why don't you do an order in your query itself like

SELECT * FROM test order by name;

You can do this only modifying query.

Use this query:

SELECT * FROM test ORDER BY name ASC, place DESC

For your error, you are using wrong variable as foreach. Replace this -

foreach($result as $k=>$v)
{
    echo $k;
}

with this -

foreach($rows as $k=>$v)
{
    echo $k;
}

Buy why are using foreach inside while loop. You can get your values like -

while($rows = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
    echo $rows['name'].' '.$rows['place'].'<br/>';
}

and don't use mysql_* function. Use instead mysqli_*

And for your expected output, try using following query -

SELECT * FROM `test` order by name asc, place desc

This is the kind of thing you can fix using array_multisort. Try the below example (which I have not tested yet, but ought to work)

<?php
include ('conn.php');
$sql="SELECT * FROM test";
$result=mysql_query($sql);

$totals = array();
$row = array();
$places = array();
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($result)){
    $totals[] = $row
    $names[] = $row['name'];
    $places[] = $row['place'];
}
array_multisort( $names, SORT_ASC, $places, SORT_DESC, $totals );

// now you can use $totals, which is sorted as you want
print_r( $totals );