Is there any way to "custom" sort an array? For instance, if I have the following numbers:
$array = array('0' => 1, '1' => 2, '2' => 3);
I would like it to order them in this fashion:
$array = array('0' => 2, '1' => 1, '2' => 3);
How would I do this or is it not possible? I am basically wanting to list this array in one database field for each user, but each order will be different depending on how the user sorts the array.
You can use
usort — Sort an array by values using a user-defined comparison function oruksort — Sort an array by keys using a user-defined comparison function oruasort — Sort an array with a user-defined comparison function and maintain index associationEach of these accepts an array and a user-defined comparison function aka callback. What you put into the comparion function is up to you. As of PHP5.3 you can also use SplHeaps to create ordered collections.
you may also want to have a look at array_multisort()
It might be better to let the database sort the array upon retrieval with the users settings. I think that is almost always preferable over sorting in PHP.
edit: I forgot that the array is probably stored as a single object so the database just handles it as an object and not an array. To still enable serverside (database server) sorting, arrays could also be expressed as seperate tables:
userID : index0 userID : index1 etc...
but this might give too much data overhead.
