How can I sort an array of UTF-8 strings in PHP?

Question

need help with sorting words by utf-8. For example, we have 5 cities from Belgium.

$array = array('Borgloon','Thuin','Lennik','Éghezée','Aubel'); sort($array); // Expected: Aubel, Borgloon, Éghezée, Lennik, Thuin               // Actual: Aubel, Borgloon, Lennik, Thuin, Éghezée 

City Éghezée should be third. Is it possible to use/set some kind of utf-8 or create my own character order?

Answer 1

intl comes bundled with PHP from PHP 5.3 and it only supports UTF-8.

You can use a Collator in this case:

$array = array('Borgloon','Thuin','Lennik','Éghezée','Aubel'); $collator = new Collator('en_US'); $collator->sort($array); print_r($array); 

Output:

Array (     [0] => Aubel     [1] => Borgloon     [2] => Éghezée     [3] => Lennik     [4] => Thuin ) 

Answer 2

I think you can use strcoll:

setlocale(LC_COLLATE, 'nl_BE.utf8'); $array = array('Borgloon','Thuin','Lennik','Éghezée','Aubel'); usort($array, 'strcoll');  print_r($array); 

Result:

Array (     [0] => Aubel     [1] => Borgloon     [2] => Éghezée     [3] => Lennik     [4] => Thuin ) 

You need the nl_BE.utf8 locale on your system:

fy@Heisenberg:~$ locale -a | grep nl_BE.utf8 nl_BE.utf8 

If you are using debian you can use dpkg --reconfigure locales to add locales.