Sorting tags by name

Question

I'm displaying a lit of tags when they have a description. I'd like to sort them by name instead of by post quantity. Is there a way to do this?

<?php 
    $tags = get_tags();
    if ($tags) {
      foreach ($tags as $tag) {
        if ($tag->description) {
          echo '<dt><a href="' . get_tag_link( $tag->term_id ) . '" title="' . sprintf( __( "View all posts in %s" ), $tag->name ) . '" ' . '><h3>' . $tag->name.'</h3></a></dt><dd style="margin-bottom: 10px;">' . $tag->description . '</dd>';
        }
      }
    }
?>

Answer 1

You should use the function wp_tag_cloud, it has many parameters as described in the codex and the one to sort the results as you want: 'orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC',.

Answer 2

Sorry, but the above answer is lacking a lot of flexibility. wp_tag_cloud() is going to output a whole slew of HTML, and nothing friendly to manipulate in the PHP.

get_tags() already has support for orderby in the input array, since it's a term query (reference: the Codex)

So here's a sample of how you'd do that, and I'm listing the full options below

      $tags = get_tags(array(
        'taxonomy' => 'post_tag',
        'orderby' => 'name',
        'hide_empty' => false // for development
      ));

Big ol' list of all available parameters with their defaults:

$args = array(
        'taxonomy'               => null,
        'object_ids'             => null,
        'orderby'                => 'name',
        'order'                  => 'ASC',
        'hide_empty'             => true,
        'include'                => array(),
        'exclude'                => array(),
        'exclude_tree'           => array(),
        'number'                 => '',
        'offset'                 => '',
        'fields'                 => 'all',
        'count'                  => false,
        'name'                   => '',
        'slug'                   => '',
        'term_taxonomy_id'       => '',
        'hierarchical'           => true,
        'search'                 => '',
        'name__like'             => '',
        'description__like'      => '',
        'pad_counts'             => false,
        'get'                    => '',
        'child_of'               => 0,
        'parent'                 => '',
        'childless'              => false,
        'cache_domain'           => 'core',
        'update_term_meta_cache' => true,
        'meta_query'             => '',
        'meta_key'               => '',
        'meta_value'             => '',
        'meta_type'              => '',
        'meta_compare'           => '',
);