RE: [PHP] sorting in array

At 05:40 PM 7/30/2006, Peter Lauri wrote:

function cmpcountry($a, $b) {

         $country1 = $a['country'];
         $country2 = $b['country'];

           if($country1=='') return 1;
           else return ($country1 < $country2) ? -1 : 1;

}

Good call, Peter; my suggestion was unnecessarily fat. Weetat, both Peter's and my solutions do work -- see here: http://juniperwebcraft.com/test/sortTest.php source code: http://juniperwebcraft.com/test/sortTest.txt I could make that last statement just a bit simpler: function cmpcountry($a, $b) {

        $country1 = ($a['country'] == '') ? "zzzzzzz" : $a['country'];
        $country2 = ($b['country'] == '') ? "zzzzzzz" : $b['country'];

        return ($country1 > '' && $country1 < $country2) ? -1 : 1;

} I'm curious to know why none of this code works properly if it directly compares ($a['country'] < $b['country']). Why are the intermediate variables necessary? Paul