Ok I was mistaken, after re-reading the previous post the ".$key" is important. What caused the sorting issue for me wasn't that at all. But rather something else.
doing an: asort($records, $flags); before returning fixes the sorting problems.
The sorting problem I was refearing to causes a character based sorting done on numeric data.
so instead of:
1
2
3
...
10
12
20
It was returned back as
1
10
12
2
20
3
...
basically what I was trying to fix in the first place.