Natural sorting algorithm in PHP with support for Unicode?

Question

Is it possible to sort an array with Unicode / UTF-8 characters in PHP using a natural order algorithm? For example (the order in this array is correctly ordered):

Answer 1

Nailed it!

$array = array('Ägile', 'Ãgile', 'Test', 'カタカナ', 'かたかな', 'Ágile', 'Àgile', 'Âgile', 'Agile');

function Sortify($string)
{
    return preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|tilde|uml);~i', '$1' . chr(255) . '$2', htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'));
}

array_multisort(array_map('Sortify', $array), $array);

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => Agile
    [1] => Ágile
    [2] => Âgile
    [3] => Àgile
    [4] => Ãgile
    [5] => Ägile
    [6] => Test
    [7] => かたかな
    [8] => カタカナ
)

---

Even better:

if (extension_loaded('intl') === true)
{
    collator_asort(collator_create('root'), $array);
}

Thanks to @tchrist!