I was attempting to sort some strings in an array alphabetically. The strings were file names I grabbed from a directory using glob. At first, I thought glob was incorrectly sorting the file names. I tried sort, and the same thing happened: 1874S-O.jpg came before 1874S.jpg
Finally, I compared them with
var_dump("11-09-2016/1874S/1874S-O.jpg" > "11-09-2016/1874S/1874S.jpg");
which returned bool(false). Any ideas why the longer string would not be greater than the shorter string and would also not come after the shorter string alphabetically?
Because . is greater than -.
Those are the first non-equal characters in your strings.
PHP is sorting this by ASCII decimal value. The sorting compares until it finds unequal values.
. has a value of 46
- has a value of 45
For kicks, you can check out this demo, where % is also less than .