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phparrayssortingmultidimensional-arraycustom-sort

two php arrays - sort one array with the value order of another


I have two PHP arrays like so:

  1. Array of X records containing the ID of Wordpress posts (in a particular order)
  2. Array of Wordpress posts

The two arrays look something like this:

Array One (Sorted Custom Array of Wordpress Post IDs)

Array (  
  [0] => 54
  [1] => 10
  [2] => 4
)

Array Two (Wordpress Post Array)

Array ( 
    [0] => stdClass Object
        (
            [ID] => 4
            [post_author] => 1
    )
    [1] => stdClass Object
        (
            [ID] => 54
            [post_author] => 1
    )
    [2] => stdClass Object
        (
            [ID] => 10
            [post_author] => 1
    )
)

I would like to sort the array of wordpress posts with the order of the ID's in the first array.

edit: The server is running PHP Version 5.2.14


Solution

  • This should be quite easy using usort, which sorts the array using a user-defined comparison function. The result might look something like this:

    usort($posts, function($a, $b) use ($post_ids) {
        return array_search($a->ID, $post_ids) - array_search($b->ID, $post_ids);
    });
    

    Note that this solution, since it uses anonymous functions and closures, requires PHP 5.3.


    One easy solution for this pre-5.3 (the dark ages!) is to do this with a quick loop and then ksort:

    $ret = array();
    $post_ids = array_flip($post_ids);
    foreach ($posts as $post) {
        $ret[$post_ids[$post->ID]] = $post;
    }
    ksort($ret);