PHP - sort an array based on another array?

Question

Is it possible in PHP to do something like this? How would you go about writing a function? Here is an example. The order is the most important thing.

$customer['address'] = '123 fake st';
$customer['name'] = 'Tim';
$customer['dob'] = '12/08/1986';
$customer['dontSortMe'] = 'this value doesnt need to be sorted';

And I'd like to do something like

$properOrderedArray = sortArrayByArray($customer, array('name', 'dob', 'address'));

Because at the end I use a foreach() and they're not in the right order (because I append the values to a string which needs to be in the correct order and I don't know in advance all of the array keys/values).

I've looked through PHP's internal array functions but it seems you can only sort alphabetically or numerically. Would I have to implement some sort of sorting function with array_walk?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

There you go:

function sortArrayByArray($array,$orderArray) {
    $ordered = array();
    foreach($orderArray as $key) {
     if(array_key_exists($key,$array)) {
      $ordered[$key] = $array[$key];
      unset($array[$key]);
     }
    }
    return $ordered + $array;
}

Answer 2

function sortArrayByArray(array $toSort, array $sortByValuesAsKeys)
{
    $commonKeysInOrder = array_intersect_key(array_flip($sortByValuesAsKeys), $toSort);
    $commonKeysWithValue = array_intersect_key($toSort, $commonKeysInOrder);
    $sorted = array_merge($commonKeysInOrder, $commonKeysWithValue);
    return $sorted;
}

Answer 3

IF you have array in your array, you'll have to adapt the function by Eran a little bit...

function sortArrayByArray($array,$orderArray) {
    $ordered = array();
    foreach($orderArray as $key => $value) {
        if(array_key_exists($key,$array)) {
                $ordered[$key] = $array[$key];
                unset($array[$key]);
        }
    }
    return $ordered + $array;
}