String to date sorting array 1

[Dashley]

Hi, I'm a VB dev and this is my 1st day developing with PHP.

I've retrieved a list of files from a directory and stripped off the ".: and the file extensions
and also the 1st 3 letters of the file name itself since they are always constant (ex. "bbn10052005.htm").
What I'm left with is a string "10052015" to which I've added two slashes in it so it looks like a date .
"10/05/2015". After loading it into an array and attempted to sort which didn't work.

I'm guessing I should convert into a date and then sort? Not sure about the correct way to convert or if i'm going in the right direction.

Ultimately I will stack the dates up in descending order. Right now I'm getting this

01/08/2015
01/22/2015
01/23/2014
02/04/2013
02/05/2015
02/06/2014
02/19/2015
02/21/2013
03/05/2015
03/07/2013
03/13/2014

Any Ideas , thoughts or samples would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[spamjim]

To sort these text strings without officially translating to a date format, you'd need to parse them as YYYYMMDD or a flavor of YYYY/MM/DD.

 

[feherke]

Hi

If not needed to do anything else with them as with dates, no need to explicitly convert. [tt]usort()[/tt] and a custom comparator will do it ( supposing the list is in variable $list ) :

[COLOR=orange]usort[/color][teal]([/teal][navy]$list[/navy][teal],[/teal] [b]function[/b][teal]([/teal][navy]$a[/navy][teal],[/teal] [navy]$b[/navy][teal]) {[/teal] [b]return[/b] [COLOR=orange]strcmp[/color][teal]([/teal][COLOR=orange]substr[/color][teal]([/teal][navy]$a[/navy][teal],[/teal] [purple]6[/purple][teal],[/teal] [purple]4[/purple][teal]) .[/teal] [COLOR=orange]substr[/color][teal]([/teal][navy]$a[/navy][teal],[/teal] [purple]0[/purple][teal],[/teal] [purple]5[/purple][teal]),[/teal] [COLOR=orange]substr[/color][teal]([/teal][navy]$b[/navy][teal],[/teal] [purple]6[/purple][teal],[/teal] [purple]4[/purple][teal]) .[/teal] [COLOR=orange]substr[/color][teal]([/teal][navy]$b[/navy][teal],[/teal] [purple]0[/purple][teal],[/teal] [purple]5[/purple][teal])); });[/teal]

Note that the callback will be executed for each needed comparison ( for the 11 item list you provided 30 times ). So do not use it for huge lists.


Feherke.
feherke.ga

 

[Dashley]

Thank you both for the responses. Feherke you usort() dropped right in and worked as soon as I changed by arrays name to $list. There will only be a few dozen rows of data and at about 24 additions a year I can run with the 30 hits per.

Thanks again

-dan