Sort an array with special characters in PHP

Question

I have an array that holds the names of languages in spanish:

$lang["ko"] = "coreano"; //korean
$lang["ar"] = "árabe"; //arabic
$lang["es"] = "español"; //spanish
$lang["fr"] = "francés"; //french

I need to order the array and maintain index association, so I use asort() with the SORT_LOCALE_STRING

setlocale(LC_ALL,'es_ES.UTF-8'); //this is at the beginning (config file)
asort($lang,SORT_LOCALE_STRING);
print_r($lang);

The expected output would be in this order:

• Array ( [ar] => árabe [ko] => coreano [es] => español [fr] => francés )

However, this is what I'm receiving:

• Array ( [ko] => coreano [es] => español [fr] => francés [ar] => árabe )

Am I missing something? Thanks for your feedback! (my server is using PHP Version 5.2.13)

Answer 1

You defined your locale incorrectly in setlocale().

Change:

setlocale(LC_ALL,'es_ES.UTF-8');

To:

setlocale(LC_ALL,'es_ES');

Output:

Array ( [ar] => árabe [ko] => coreano [es] => español [fr] => francés ) 

Answer 2

The documentation for setlocale mentions that

Different systems have different naming schemes for locales.

It's possible that your system does not recognize the locale as es_ES. If you are on Windows, try esp_ESP instead.