ConFoo Montreal 2026: Call for Papers

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chris at ocproducts dot com
8 years ago
This function has some interesting behaviour on strings consisting of mixed numbers and letters.

One may expect that such a mixed string would be treated as alpha-numeric, but that is not true.

var_dump(strnatcmp('23','123')); →
int(-1)
As expected, 23<123 (even though first digit is higher, overall number is smaller)

var_dump(strnatcmp('yz','xyz')); →
int(1)
As expected, yz>xyz (string comparison, irregardless of string length)

var_dump(strnatcmp('2x','12y')); →
int(-1)
Remarkable, 2x<12y (does a numeric comparison)

var_dump(strnatcmp('20x','12y'));
int(1)
Remarkable, 20x>12y (does a numeric comparison)

It seems to be splitting what is being compared into runs of numbers and letters, and then comparing each run in isolation, until it has an ordering difference.

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