Posted by Peter J Ross on 11/25/05 01:22

Greetings. I'm quite new to PHP and have very little knowledge of
programming in general, so I may be missing something obvious, but I
can't find a solution to the following difficulty in either the PHP
manual or Google.

I have a tab-delimited text file containing numerous lines of data,
which is searched for matches to a query from an HTML form. I want to
be able to sort the resulting two-dimensional array of matches by one
column only, leaving the other columns unsorted. For example, if three
lines match "bar0",

foo02 bar01 foobar foobar
foo03 bar02 foobar foobar
foo01 bar01 foobar foobar

should become

foo02 bar01 foobar foobar
foo01 bar01 foobar foobar
foo03 bar02 foobar foobar

not

foo01 bar01 foobar foobar
foo02 bar01 foobar foobar
foo03 bar02 foobar foobar

The following method works for sorting on the second column, but seems
both inelegant and inflexible (especially if I want to sort on the
third or fourth column instead:

#v+

<?php
$data = file("filename.txt");
$sortkey = 0;
foreach($data as $line) {
// if the line matches a regex, do this:
$temp = explode("\t", rtrim($line,"\n"));
$newdata[]= array($temp[1], $sortkey, $temp[0], $temp[2], $temp[3]);
$sortkey++;
}
if(sizeof($newdata) > 0) {
sort($newdata);
foreach($newdata as $line) {
echo $line[2]."\t".$line[0]."\t".$line[3]."\t".$line[4]."\n";
}
}
?>

#v-

Is there a less clumsy way of doing this kind of thing without having
to use a "real" database? I've tried all the inbuilt array-sorting
functions, without any success so far.

PJR :-)
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