Page collections sorted by date that include valid negative timestamps ordered wrong

[ghost]

I have a number of pages I'm trying to sort by the 'date' field (descending), with some being dates before 1970 and thus being represented by a negative timestamp (though valid as the dates are between 1965 and 1970). Grav is sorting that collection like so:

• 124141560
• 97531320
• 63664260
• -148637760
• -111733800
• -31294320
• -28268880

As you can see, the four negative timestamps are sorted in reverse. I've worked out that this is because Grav is sorting using the SORT_REGULAR flag, meaning it is first sorting the numbers as strings and then as a numbers. Changing lines 1204-1207 in Pages.php from:

case 'date':
    $list[$key] = $child->date();
    $sort_flags = SORT_REGULAR;
    break;

to:

case 'date':
    $list[$key] = $child->date();
    $sort_flags = SORT_NUMERIC;
    break;

leads to these dates to be ordered correctly.

I have tried using a call to order() with the 1 constant (as detailed by Flavio here #1199 (comment)), but the constant doesn't take effect because I'm sorting on date and thus the switch at line 1200 in Pages.php always sets the flag to SORT_REGULAR.

As date is represented by a number, shouldn't that line in the switch always be set to SORT_NUMERIC? If not, is there another fix?

I'm running Grav 1.3.10.

[rhukster]

it actually sounds like it should be fixed in Grav itself. date should always be numeric, and therefore, should be sorted as such. I'll fix in 1.4 branch.

[rhukster]

fixed here: 72abab6