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

Using your example with codepage 1252 worked perfectly fine here on my windows development machine.

$array=array('Birnen', 'Äpfel', 'Ungetüme', 'Apfel', 'Ungetiere', 'Österreich');
$oldLocal=setlocale(LC_COLLATE, "0");
var_dump(setlocale(LC_COLLATE, 'German_Germany.1252'));
usort($array, 'strcoll');
var_dump(setlocale(LC_COLLATE, $oldLocal));
var_dump($array);

...snip...

This was with PHP 5.2.6. btw.

---

The above example is wrong, it uses ASCII encoding instead of UTF-8. I did trace the strcoll() calls and look what I found:

function traceStrColl($a, $b) {
    $outValue = strcoll($a, $b);
    echo "$a $b $outValue\r\n";
    return $outValue;
}

$array=array('Birnen', 'Äpfel', 'Ungetüme', 'Apfel', 'Ungetiere', 'Österreich');
setlocale(LC_COLLATE, 'German_Germany.65001');
usort($array, 'traceStrColl');
print_r($array);

gives:

Ungetüme Äpfel 2147483647
Ungetüme Birnen 2147483647
Ungetüme Apfel 2147483647
Ungetüme Ungetiere 2147483647
Österreich Ungetüme 2147483647
Äpfel Ungetiere 2147483647
Äpfel Birnen 2147483647
Apfel Äpfel 2147483647
Ungetiere Birnen 2147483647

I did find some bug reports which have been flagged being bogus... The best bet you have is filing a bug-report I suppose though...