Sorting is always more expensive than going through the array once. I would just iterate through once and keep track of the smallest or largest element by storing the smallest or largest element in a temporary variable. There should really be a php function for that. On Sun, 3 May 2015 4:07 am Ron Piggott <ron.piggott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 02/05/15 07:29, Christoph Becker wrote: > > Ashley Sheridan wrote: > > > >> On 2 May 2015 11:57:42 BST, Christoph Becker <cmbecker69@xxxxxx> wrote: > >>> Ron Piggott wrote: > >>> > >>>> I have the following array: > >>>> > >>>> Array > >>>> ( > >>>> [es-PR] => 2014-11-04 08:22:07 > >>>> [en-US] => 2009-04-05 09:00:00 > >>>> [es-MX] => 2014-11-08 02:25:40 > >>>> ) > >>>> > >>>> How can I extract the oldest date from it? The language ISO order is > >>>> going to change randomly. > >>> I suggest you sort() the array, and then access the first element: > >>> > >>> sort($array); > >>> $oldest = $array[0]; > >> Sorting like this would put the earliest date first, and you can't > access it by numeric index. > Ron is looking for the oldest date, what seems to be the same as the > earliest date. Anyhow, otherwise one could use rsort() instead of > sort(). Accessing by numeric index is possible after either sorting, > because both functions don't keep the keys (contrary to asort() and > arsort()): $array = [ 'es-PR' => '2014-11-04 08:22:07', 'en-US' => > '2009-04-05 09:00:00', 'es-MX' => '2014-11-08 02:25:40' ]; sort($array); > var_dump($array); > > > > In the end I've used > > // sort newest to oldest translation > > rsort($array); > > // extract oldest translation > > $array=end($array); > > Thank you very much for your help. > > Ron > > >
