How to compare 2 strings alphabetically in PHP?

Question

What the title says. Specifically if I have

$array1['name'] = 'zoo';
$array2['name'] = 'fox';

How can I determine that alphabetically $array2's name should come above $array1's?

Answer 1

Use strcmp. If the first argument to strcmp is lexicographically smaller to the second, then the value returned will be negative. If both are equal, then it will return 0. And if the first is lexicograpically greater than the second then a positive number will be returned.

nb. You probably want to use strcasecmp(string1,string2), which ignores case...

Answer 2

You can compare both strings with strcmp:

Returns < 0 if str1 is less than str2; > 0 if str1 is greater than str2, and 0 if they are equal.

Answer 3

I'm a little late (then again I wasn't a programmer yet in 2009 :-) No one mentioned this yet, but you can simply use the operators which you use on number as well.

< > <= >= == != and more

For example:

'a' > 'b' returns false

'a' < 'b' returns true

http://php.net/manual/en/language.operators.comparison.php

IMPORTANT

There is a flaw, which you can find in the comments below.