Sort Multidimensional Array by Column

Question

I have a multi-dimensional array and have tried every example code I can find from this website to sort it by a column. Not a single snippet I have tried has worked and for some reason all of them result in some strange mess of ordering. I cannot for the life of me figure out what is causing this and hope someone can point it out...

    if ($devices_xml = curl_get_file_contents($devices_url))
    {
        $devices = simplexml_load_string($devices_xml);

        $data = array(array());
        $counter = 0;

        foreach ($devices->item as $device)
        {
            $data[$counter]["id"] = $device->objid;
            $data[$counter]["probe"] = $device->probe;
            $data[$counter]["name"] = $device->device;

            $counter++;
        }

        array_sort_by_column($data, "probe");
        return $data;
    }

    return false;
}

My Multi-dimensional sorting function that works for everything else but not this is as follows...

function array_sort_by_column(&$arr, $col, $dir = SORT_ASC)
{
    $sort_col = array();
    foreach ($arr as $key=> $row)
    {
        $sort_col[$key] = $row[$col];
    }

    array_multisort($sort_col, $dir, $arr);
}

The result comes out looking like this. Probe is the test such as "DE-FRANKFURT" at the beginning and name is the second part such as "EU-DE-010"

Answer 1

This was fixed by casting the SimpleXML Objects to strings. None of the sorting functions were working correctly until that was done, then it was correct.