What considerations should be taken into account when sorting a list by gender in PHP?

When sorting a list by gender in PHP, it's important to consider that gender is not a binary category and individuals may identify in various ways beyond just male and female. One approach to sorting by gender is to create a custom sorting function that categorizes individuals based on their gender identity. This function can then be used with PHP's array sorting functions to sort the list accordingly. 

// Sample array of individuals with gender information
$people = [
    ['name' => 'John', 'gender' => 'male'],
    ['name' => 'Jane', 'gender' => 'female'],
    ['name' => 'Alex', 'gender' => 'non-binary'],
    ['name' => 'Sam', 'gender' => 'male'],
];

// Custom sorting function based on gender
function sortGender($a, $b) {
    $genderOrder = ['female', 'male', 'non-binary']; // Define order of genders
    return array_search($a['gender'], $genderOrder) - array_search($b['gender'], $genderOrder);
}

// Sort the list of people by gender
usort($people, 'sortGender');

// Output sorted list
foreach ($people as $person) {
    echo $person['name'] . ' - ' . $person['gender'] . "\n";
}

Keywords

PHP sorting list gender considerations

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