How to sort an array of UTF-8 strings?

Question

I currentyl have no clue on how to sort an array which contains UTF-8 encoded strings in PHP. The array comes from a LDAP server so sorting via a database (would be no problem) is no solution. The following does not work on my windows development machine (although I'd think that this should be at least a possible solution):

$array=array('Birnen', 'Äpfel', 'Ungetüme', 'Apfel', 'Ungetiere', 'Österreich'); $oldLocal=setlocale(LC_COLLATE, "0"); var_dump(setlocale(LC_COLLATE, 'German_Germany.65001')); usort($array, 'strcoll'); var_dump(setlocale(LC_COLLATE, $oldLocal)); var_dump($array); 

The output is:

string(20) "German_Germany.65001" string(1) "C" array(6) {   [0]=>   string(6) "Birnen"   [1]=>   string(9) "Ungetiere"   [2]=>   string(6) "Äpfel"   [3]=>   string(5) "Apfel"   [4]=>   string(9) "Ungetüme"   [5]=>   string(11) "Österreich" } 

This is complete nonsense. Using 1252 as the codepage for setlocale() gives another output but still a plainly wrong one:

string(19) "German_Germany.1252" string(1) "C" array(6) {   [0]=>   string(11) "Österreich"   [1]=>   string(6) "Äpfel"   [2]=>   string(5) "Apfel"   [3]=>   string(6) "Birnen"   [4]=>   string(9) "Ungetüme"   [5]=>   string(9) "Ungetiere" } 

Is there a way to sort an array with UTF-8 strings locale aware?

Just noted that this seems to be PHP on Windows problem, as the same snippet with de_DE.utf8 used as locale works on a Linux machine. Nevertheless a solution for this Windows-specific problem would be nice...

Answer 1

$a = array( 'Кръстев', 'Делян1', 'делян1', 'Делян2', 'делян3', 'кръстев' ); $col = new \Collator('bg_BG'); $col->asort( $a ); var_dump( $a ); 

Prints:

array   2 => string 'делян1' (length=11)   1 => string 'Делян1' (length=11)   3 => string 'Делян2' (length=11)   4 => string 'делян3' (length=11)   5 => string 'кръстев' (length=14)   0 => string 'Кръстев' (length=14) 

The Collator class is defined in PECL intl extension. It is distributed with PHP 5.3 sources but might be disabled for some builds. E.g. in Debian it is in package php5-intl .

Collator::compare is useful for usort.