Sort by date via arrays.

[Kayn]

Hey hey!

I'm having a bit of an issue sorting by date with arrays. For example...

I did some scouring around and found these dateAsc and dateDesc functions. It doesn't work at all.

function dateAsc($a, $b) {
    return strcmp($a["date"], $b["date"]);
}

function dateDesc($a, $b) {
    return strcmp($b["date"],$a["date"]);
}

while (false !== ($file = readdir($dir_handle))) {  //loop through all the files in the path
        if ($file == "." || $file == "..") {
            continue;
        }  //ignore these
        
        // these have to be htm files
        if (substr_count($file, ".htm") > 0) {
            // now we gotta make the files ledgible. 
            $arr_split_it = explode("__",$file);
            $press_date[$count] = strtotime($arr_split_it[0]);
            $press_title[$count] = $arr_split_it[1];
            
            $press_list[$count] = "<li><a href=\"press.php?file=" . urlencode($file) . "\">" . str_replace("__"," ",str_replace(".htm","",stripslashes(urldecode($file)))) . "</a></li>";
            $count++;
        }
    }

uasort($press_date, "dateDesc"); 

The output looks like this:

• 07-01-08 New Power Engineer
• 04-08-08 Data Network
• 04-08-09 Fiber to the Home

As you can see, the dates are not in order.

Basically this scripts reads files from a directory with the date in the file name, removes the double underscore and the .htm extension and displays it as a readable format on a web page.

All I need to be able to do now is sort them by the date descending. And no, databases are not an option here.

Any thoughts? Thanks!

[Dan Grossman]

Storing and sorting the date, title and list in separate arrays won't work. Even if you sort the date array correctly, now the order of its values doesn't match the order of the values in the other arrays, and it becomes useless information.

Keep all the file information in a multidimensional array and sort that whole array by date.

[Kayn]

Hmmm. That's interesting. I'm not very familiar with multi-dimensional arrays.

Using my example above, how would you take that file information and place it into a multidimensional array?

[Dan Grossman]

In addition to your current arrays:

$data[$count]['date'] = strtotime($arr_split_it[0]);
$data[$count]['title'] = $arr_split_it[1];
$data[$count]['list'] = "<li><a href=\"press.php?file=" . urlencode($file) . "\">" . str_replace("__"," ",str_replace(".htm","",stripslashes(urldecode($file)))) . "</a></li>"; 

Try try to do something with array_multisort using the date and the $data arrays, maybe.

[Kayn]

Cool I'll give it a try. Thanks!

[Kayn]

Well, it does work after converting the dates to unix timestamps and sorting them that way.

Thanks Dan!