On Sun, 3 May 2015 at 12:00 German Geek <geek.de@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. > It's not necessarily true to say that sorting is always more expensive than going through the array once. Sorting is happening in C, whereas going through the array once will be happening in PHP. C will definitely be faster than PHP, but I'm not sure which will be faster between these two. However, the more important factor is how many entries there are in the array. Based on the example provided it's tiny, so unless the OP is doing this operation thousands of times a second both methods are sensible options, and sorting will contain far fewer moving parts in userland. -Stuart -- Stuart Dallas 3ft9 Ltd http://3ft9.com/ > 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 > > > > > > >
