CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpxmlsimplexml
Talon
Talon

Reputation: 4995

How to Sort a PHP Simple XML Tree by Date

I'm navgating through an XML Tree like this:

$notesXML = simplexml_load_string(XMLSTRING);

foreach($notesXML as $thenote){
  $noteAttr = $thenote->attributes();
  echo $noteAttr['modified'];
}

As you can see there is an attribute called "modified" as a part of the XML tree, what I want to do for now is just print out the XML tree in ascending or descending order based on the modified date. BTW the date string is formatted like this: "Tuesday 6th of September 2011 03:49:14 PM"

Thanks for any help

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1514

Answers (1)

salathe
salathe

Reputation: 51970

You could build an array of the elements that you want to sort, then use one of the array sorting functions to re-order them.

The snippet below uses array_multisort() to sort them by descending date order. DateTime::createFromFormat() is used to get the Unix timestamp from the date strings.

$notes = array();
$dates = array();
foreach ($notesXML as $note) {
    $notes[] = $note;
    $dates[] = DateTime::createFromFormat('l jS \of F Y H:i:s A', $note['modified'])->getTimestamp();
}
array_multisort($dates, SORT_DESC, $notes);

// Loop over $notes however you like

Upvotes: 2

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