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 probl

Answer 1

This is a very complex issue, since UTF-8 encoded data can contain any Unicode character (i.e. characters from many 8-bit encodings which collate differently in different locales).

Perhaps if you converted your UTF-8 data into Unicode (not familiar with PHP unicode functions, sorry) and then normalized them into NFD or NFKD and then sorting on code points might give some collation that would make sense to you (ie "A" before "Ä").

Check the links I provided.

EDIT: since you mention that your input data are clear (I assume they all fall in the "windows-1252" codepage), then you should do the following conversion: UTF-8 → Unicode → Windows-1252, on which Windows-1252 encoded data do a sort selecting the "CP1252" locale.