What role does sorting play in manipulating and organizing arrays in PHP, and when is it necessary to use functions like ksort?

Sorting plays a crucial role in manipulating and organizing arrays in PHP by arranging the elements in a specific order. Functions like ksort are necessary when you want to sort an array by keys while maintaining the key-value associations. This is useful when you need to display data in a specific order or perform operations based on the keys of the array.

// Example of using ksort to sort an array by keys
$fruits = array("banana" => 2, "apple" => 5, "orange" => 3);
ksort($fruits);
print_r($fruits);