Sorting people by name in PHP

For 2023 (and 2024 ...) - we are now fully retired from IT training.
We have made many, many friends over 25 years of teaching about Python, Tcl, Perl, PHP, Lua, Java, C and C++ - and MySQL, Linux and Solaris/SunOS too. Our training notes are now very much out of date, but due to upward compatability most of our examples remain operational and even relevant ad you are welcome to make us if them "as seen" and at your own risk.

Lisa and I (Graham) now live in what was our training centre in Melksham - happy to meet with former delegates here - but do check ahead before coming round. We are far from inactive - rather, enjoying the times that we are retired but still healthy enough in mind and body to be active!

I am also active in many other area and still look after a lot of web sites - you can find an index ((here))

Our petition for a reasonable train service is going great guns - over 1000 signed up in just over a week, amongst them significant players such as MPs, MEPs .... but, my goodness, the list as presented by the web site is hard to look through. So I've grabbed a copy of the list and sorted it - see here.

Sorting by name is not straightforward!

If you just do an alphabetic sort, you get everyone with the same forename first - I've got a customer who does that with their internal phone directory and, goodness, it's awkward to us. So you need a sort routine thats sorts based on the LAST space separated word.

Except that there's a group of people who add things like "MP", "MEP" and "MBE" after their names and that becomes the final field. Actually, I want to highlight those people into a separate list.

and then some MPs and MEP sign up and DON'T add in their 'letters' ....

If you want to have a look at my solution to the awkward sort, I've added in the source code to my training examples and it's here. It works well, but in some cases there's no east way that adding in specific tables of exceptions ....
(written 2007-01-26)

Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles

H999 - Additional PHP Material
  [54] PHP and natural sorting - (2004-09-19)
  [239] What and why for the epoch - (2005-03-08)
  [320] Ordnance Survey - using a 'Get a map' - (2005-05-22)
  [322] More maps - (2005-05-23)
  [337] the array returned by preg_match_all - (2005-06-06)
  [372] Time calculation in PHP - (2005-07-08)
  [468] Stand alone PHP programs - (2005-10-18)
  [483] Double Dollars in PHP - (2005-11-02)
  [493] Running a Perl script within a PHP page - (2005-11-12)
  [563] Merging pictures using PHP and GD - (2006-01-13)
  [603] PHP - setting sort order with an associative array - (2006-02-13)
  [665] PHP Image viewing application - (2006-04-01)
  [687] Presentation, Business and Persistence layers in Perl and PHP - (2006-04-17)
  [789] Hot answers in PHP - (2006-07-02)
  [806] Check your user is human. Have him retype a word in a graphic - (2006-07-17)
  [822] PHP - a team member leaves - (2006-08-04)
  [839] Reporting on the 10 largest files or 10 top scores - (2006-08-20)
  [917] Syntax checking in PHP - (2006-11-07)
  [937] Display an image from a MySQL database in a web page via PHP - (2006-11-22)
  [1010] Dates, times, clickable diarys in PHP - (2006-12-28)
  [1020] Parallel processing in PHP - (2007-01-03)
  [1104] Drawing dynamic graphs in PHP - (2007-03-09)
  [1194] Drawing hands on a clock face - PHP - (2007-05-19)
  [1270] PHP Standalone - keyboard to screen - (2007-07-18)
  [1389] Controlling and labelling Google maps via PHP - (2007-10-13)
  [1390] Converting from postal address to latitude / longitude - (2007-10-13)
  [1391] Ordnance Survey Grid Reference to Latitude / Longitude - (2007-10-14)
  [1451] More PHP sample and demonstration programs - (2007-12-01)
  [1485] Copyright and theft of images, bandwidth and members. - (2007-12-26)
  [1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
  [1519] Flipping images on your web page - (2008-01-26)
  [1623] PHP Techniques - a workshop - (2008-04-26)
  [2073] Extra PHP Examples - (2009-03-09)
  [2215] If nothing, make it nothing. - (2009-06-02)
  [2684] Exception handling in PHP - (2010-03-18)
  [3118] Arrays of arrays - or 2D arrays. How to program tables. - (2011-01-02)
  [3210] Catchable fatal error in PHP ... How to catch, and alternative solutions such as JSON - (2011-03-22)
  [4655] Image indexer / thumbnail display scripts in PHP - (2016-02-25)

H110 - PHP - HTML Web Page Data Handling
  [50] Current cost in your local currency - (2004-09-16)
  [589] Robust PHP user inputs - (2006-02-03)
  [896] PHP - good coding practise and sticky radio buttons - (2006-10-17)
  [1001] .pdf files - upload via PHP, store in MySQL, retrieve - (2006-12-19)
  [1136] Buffering output - why it is done and issues raised in Tcl, Perl, Python and PHP - (2007-04-06)
  [1169] Emailing as HTML (Web Page) - PHP example - (2007-04-30)
  [1831] Text formating for HTML, with PHP - (2008-10-11)
  [2025] Injection Attack if register_globals in on - PHP - (2009-02-04)
  [2046] Finding variations on a surname - (2009-02-17)
  [2107] How to tweet automatically from a blog - (2009-03-28)
  [2135] What features does this visitors browser support? (PHP) - (2009-04-22)
  [3036] Sending out an email containing HTML from within a PHP page - (2010-11-07)
  [3926] Filtering PHP form inputs - three ways, but which should you use? - (2012-11-18)

Back to
Learning to write secure, maintainable PHP

Previous and next
or
Horse's mouth home

Forward to
UK legal requirements for your commercial web site

Some other Articles

Selling by phone and Skype - our policy
Another frantic posting!
Above the fold
UK legal requirements for your commercial web site
Sorting people by name in PHP
Learning to write secure, maintainable PHP
Too busy to blog it - but it's great (mostly)
The HTML++ Metalanguage
Java 6, Apache Tomcat 6.
Getting rid of people - hotel techniques

4759 posts, page by page

Link to page ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96 at 50 posts per page

This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

Link to Ezine home page (for reading).
Link to Blogging home page (to add comments).

You can Add a comment or ranking to this page

Like this? ??