How To Sort A Multidimensional Array By One Element In PHP

I had a table’s worth of listings and had stored all the values in a multidimensional array in PHP. The problem was, I needed to sort the multidimensional array, but based on just one element. Here’s the easiest, fastest solution that I found from the array_multisort function page of PHP (thanks to zequez at gmail dot com!).

Here’s his original solution taken from that page:

$multiArray = Array(
    Array("id" => 1, "name" => "Defg"),
    Array("id" => 2, "name" => "Abcd"),
    Array("id" => 3, "name" => "Bcde"),
    Array("id" => 4, "name" => "Cdef"));
$tmp = Array();
foreach($multiArray as &$ma)
    $tmp[] = &$ma["name"];
array_multisort($tmp, $multiArray);
foreach($multiArray as &$ma)
    echo $ma["name"]."
";
               
/* Outputs
    Abcd
    Bcde
    Cdef
    Defg
*/ 

My requirements are similar, but not exactly the same, and so I had to tweak the code slightly to fit my needs. I had a huge table of values, but needed to sort the entire multidimensional array by the second column, which was a column of price values. Here’s a simplified version of my tweaked code:

$itemtable = Array(
    Array(1, 253.12),
    Array(2, 569.24),
    Array(3, 85.69),
    Array(4, 91.27));
$tmp = Array();
  foreach($itemtable as &$ma) {
	$tmp[] = &$ma[1]; //this just refers to the 2nd element of my 2-element array
  }
  array_multisort($tmp, $itemtable); 

And that’s it! That’s the fastest, easiest way that I found to sort a multidimensional array, but based on just one element.