How to sort an array of objects in PHP?

Question

Say I have a group of people, each person having a name, sex, and age property, coded like this:

public class Person
{
   private $name, $sex, $age;
   public function Person ($name, $sex, $age)
   {
       $this->name = $name;
       $this->sex = $sex;
       $this->age = $age;
   }
   public function getName();    
   public function getSex();
   public function getAge();
}

public class People
{
   private $people = array();
   public function addPerson ($name, $sex, $age)
   {
      $this->people[] = new Person($name, $sex, $age);
   }
}

How could I implement a method sortPeople() which sorted the $people array in ascending order of the peoples' names to the People class?

Answer 1

Here is a working code with a static method. It also uses the fact that the static method can access private ivars :) It also uses PHP awesome reflexivity <3.

The good point about that code is that Person is the class to provide the sort method, which is better on an OOP point of view. Only the class Person should be the one to know how to sort other Person. Neither People or another indepent function should.

Note: not using is_callable(), as it only verifies if the parameter can be called as a function, but does not check if it's actually callable with the current visibility (public, private, protected)

class Person
{
    private $name, $sex, $age;
    public function Person($name, $sex, $age)
    {
        $this->name = $name;
        $this->sex = $sex;
        $this->age = $age;
    }

    public static function sortByName(Person $p1, Person $p2)
    {
        return strcmp($p1->name, $p2->name);
    }

    public static function sortByAge(Person $p1, Person $p2)
    {
        return ($p1->age - $p2->age);
    }
}

class People
{
    private $people = array();
    public function addPerson($name, $sex, $age)
    {
        $this->people[] = new Person($name, $sex, $age);
    }

    public function display()
    {
        print_r($this->people);
    }

    public function sort($attribute = 'name')
    {
        $sortFct = 'sortBy' . ucfirst(strtolower($attribute));
        if (!in_array($sortFct, get_class_methods('Person')))
        {
            throw new Exception('People->sort(): Can\'t sort by ' . $attribute);
        }
        usort($this->people, 'Person::' . $sortFct);
    }
}

$people = new People;
$people->addPerson('Steve', 'M', 31);
$people->addPerson('John', 'M', 24);
$people->addPerson('Jane', 'F', 26);
$people->addPerson('Sally', 'F', 21);
$people->display();
$people->sort();
$people->display();
$people->sort('age');
$people->display();