- Creating the Catalog Array 4:43
- Adding Elements and Specifying a Key 3:20
- Introducing Arrays 4 objectives
- Associative Arrays 5:30
- Associative Arrays 7 objectives
- Displaying All Items 3:30
- Multidimensional Arrays 8 questions
- Creating the Display Function 4:56
- Working with Functions 8 questions
- Random Fun with Arrays 3:36
- Introducing Functions 1 objective
- Displaying Categories 5:50
- Sorting Array Items 6:05
- Item Details and Redirection 5:35
- Array Keys 2 objectives
- Displaying Item Details 5:55
- More Excitement With Arrays 6 questions
- Review Basics 3 objectives
- Wrapping It Up 0:45
Preview
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Sorting Array Items
6:05Now that you know how to grab specific items, the next step is to be able to sort those items to make it easier to check for a specific item.
In the last video, you learned how to grab
only the items in a certain category.
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With our current data,
that's only four items on a category page.
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So it doesn't really make much
difference how it's sorted.
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That's easy enough to see everything, but
when we look full catalog of 12 items,
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we can start to see how we could easily
miss a particular item when our catalog
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expands.
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It would be much easier to find things
if we could sort this by title.
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So, let's get into our function and
make some modifications.
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Go back into function.php and
go into the array category function.
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After we check if this
item matches our category.
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We want to create a variable to use for
sorting.
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We can choose any element to sort with,
but
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title would seem to be the most useful.
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So we set sort =
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item "title".
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Now instead of just adding
the key to the array,
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we also want to assign the value to sort.
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We change this line to be output id
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= sort.
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Before we return our output array,
we need to do two things.
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One, sort the array using
a built-in function
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called asort, asort($output);
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Since we changed our array to
include more than just the keys,
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we want to return only the keys,
like we did on null.
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So again, we use array_keys.
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Let's go back to our browser and
see what this looks like on our page.
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We go into books,
our book items are now sorted by title.
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Great, but you'll notice, The Clean Coder
is at the end because it starts with a T.
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Typically, when items are alphabetized,
the preposition a, and,
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and the,
are ignored at the beginning of the title.
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Let's set up our code to work that way.
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We want to remove, or trim, any the, a,
or and from the beginning of our sort.
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To do this,
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we'll use another built in function,
ltrim, meaning trim from the left.
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After setting the variable for
sort, let's add the following line.
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Sort equals ltrim,
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sort, T-H-E space.
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Make sure you include
the space after T-H-E or
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it will trim T-H-E off anything and
not just the word the.
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This means that theme would become me,
and that's not what we want to happen.
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Let's copy this line twice.
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And change the to a and
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an respectively.
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Now, when we refresh our page in the
browser, our books are sorted by title.
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And The Clean Coder is right next to Clean
Code because the sort is ignoring The at
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the beginning of the title.
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Our Movies page and our Music page
are also sorting alphabetically.
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The only page that's not sorting
alphabetically yet is our full catalog.
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Let's go back into our function and
fix that.
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Back in our function,
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we have it returning just an array of
all the keys, if our category is null.
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Let's combine our if statements.
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Let's move this first if down to this if.
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Then we'll combine it with an or.
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Now our function will sort the items
that match our category, or
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sort all the items if we
pass a null category.
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Before we go, let's change our h1 tag to
include the link to the full catalog.
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We only wanna do this if
we're on a category page.
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So we'll start by adding a conditional.
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Up here with our page title.
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We'll first start with if
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section is not equal null.
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Going to do something.
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Pay special attention to the exclamation
point which is our negation or
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not operator.
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It can be confusing when you
start working with negatives, but
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it can also make things a lot easier.
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One value not true versus
multiple values that are true.
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If our section variable is null
then we're on our full catalog.
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And we don't need to show that link.
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But we are checking to see if our
section variable is not null.
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So we can print an extra line
that links to our full catalog.
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We're going to use
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a special character
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to separate our title.
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& gt;,
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this is a greater than sign but it keeps
it from being confused with our HTML.
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Whether our section variable is null or
not, we still want to keep our page title.
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Now when we preview our page,
we can click through our categories and
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back to our full catalog.
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Our Catalog page is ready to go.
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And you've learned a lot about utilizing
arrays and the built-in array functions.
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There are several other functions
associated with sorting and arrays.
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Including reverse order and sorting
the array keys instead of the values.
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Go back into the array functions in
the PHP docs and give some of them a try.
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