PHP

Every so often I find myself with a multidimensional array that I want to sort by a value in a sub-array. I have an array that might look like this:

//an array of some songs I like
$songs =  array(
		'1' => array('artist'=>'The Smashing Pumpkins', 'songname'=>'Soma'),
		'2' => array('artist'=>'The Decemberists', 'songname'=>'The Island'),
		'3' => array('artist'=>'Fleetwood Mac', 'songname' =>'Second-hand News')
	);

The problem is thus: I’d like to echo out the songs I like in the format “Songname (Artist),” and I’d like to do it alphabetically by artist. PHP provides many functions for sorting arrays, but none will work here. ksort() will allow me to sort by key, but the keys in the $songs array are irrelevant. asort() allows me to sort and preserves keys, but it will sort $songs by the value of each element, which is also useless, since the value of each is “array()”. usort() is another possible candidate and can do multi-dimensional sorting, but it involves building a callback function and is often pretty long-winded. Even the examples in the PHP docs references specific keys.

So I developed a quick function to sort by the value of a key in a sub-array. Please note this version does a case-insensitive sort. See subval_sort() below.

function subval_sort($a,$subkey) {
	foreach($a as $k=>$v) {
		$b[$k] = strtolower($v[$subkey]);
	}
	asort($b);
	foreach($b as $key=>$val) {
		$c[] = $a[$key];
	}
	return $c;
}

To use it on the above, I would simply type:

$songs = subval_sort($songs,'artist'); 
print_r($songs);

This is what you should expect see:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [artist] => Fleetwood Mac
            [song] => Second-hand News
        )
 
    [1] => Array
        (
            [artist] => The Decemberists
            [song] => The Island
        )
 
    [2] => Array
        (
            [artist] => The Smashing Pumpkins
            [song] => Cherub Rock
        )
 
)

The songs, sorted by artist.

We have a new web-based client portal application we are going to use for my company extranet. However, because it was originally designed to be a hosted application, there are several variables involved in all areas that don’t apply to us, since we host it ourselves.

When using said portal, every URL looks something like:

domain.com/login.aspx?QS=jasbndfiaubnfoaeuifwoeifbwfe

The only difference is that the “QS” GET variable is even longer. I made the request of our developers to get rid of this query string for the login page, and the login page only. This is what that code looks like in PHP, inserted at line 1.

if(!$_GET['QS']) { 
     $_GET['QS'] = 'jasbndfiaubnfoaeuifwoeifbwfe'; 
}

That’s it. One line of code. In ASP.net, this cost me 3 hours of developer time. THREE hours.

Then I asked our old developers to make a change to their code. It was doing a check in login if they are customers from the new app or the old one. If they are old, it processes the login. If it’they are new, it gives them an error message. So I said, instead of giving them the error, let’s redirect them to /new-directory/login.aspx?email=[base64_encoded email]&password=[base64_encoded password].

This is that code in PHP:

if($is_new) { 
     header("Location: /newdirectory/login.aspx?email="
.base64_encode(stripslashes($_POST['email'])) . "&password="
.base64_encode(stripslashes($_POST['password'])));
} else {
     //process login
}

This cost me 2 hours at $165. Am I getting taken for a ride? I keep telling them – this would take 30 seconds in PHP. And they tell me, yes but ASP.net doesn’t work that way, and we need to change the web.config, and we need to recompile the entire site, etc, etc. If it were just one vendor, I’d be more suspicious, but two separate, unrelated developers are giving me crazy quotes like this.

I hear people bitch about PHP online ad nauseum. Every time I see real code, it appears PHP is FAR faster and far more friendly when it comes to customization.