WordPress loop by meta key that is an array? and how loop multiple arrays

You can’t order by values inside serialised arrays in post meta. When you store an array like this:

$value = [
    [
            'plan_name'  => 'name 1',
            'plan_price' => '1',
            'theType'    => 'yesPaid',
            'plan_space' => 'Unlimited',
    ],
    [
            'plan_name'  => 'name 2',
            'plan_price' => '3',
            'theType'    => 'yesFree',
            'plan_space' => '5000',
    ],
    [
            'plan_name'  => 'name2',
            'plan_price' => '5',
            'theType'    => 'yesPaid',
            'plan_space' => 'Unlimited',
    ],
]

This is stored in PHP like this:

a:3:{i:0;a:4:{s:9:"plan_name";s:6:"name 1";s:10:"plan_price";s:1:"1";s:7:"theType";s:7:"yesPaid";s:10:"plan_space";s:9:"Unlimited";}i:1;a:4:{s:9:"plan_name";s:6:"name 2";s:10:"plan_price";s:1:"3";s:7:"theType";s:7:"yesFree";s:10:"plan_space";s:4:"5000";}i:2;a:4:{s:9:"plan_name";s:5:"name2";s:10:"plan_price";s:1:"5";s:7:"theType";s:7:"yesPaid";s:10:"plan_space";s:9:"Unlimited";}}

As far as MySQL — which is responsible for querying posts — is concerned, this is just a long string. Indistinguihsable from a word or sentence that begins with a. It’s only turned back into an array by WordPress when the value is retrieved with get_post_meta().

So it’s not possible to sort by a property within an array, and if you attempt to sort by the meta value of this meta then it’s just going to sort as if this were a string.

If you need to sort this way then you need to find an alternate way of storing the data. I don’t have enough insight into your project to suggest anything specific, but you probably need a custom database table for these plans, which you’d then need to join and sort using the posts_join and posts_orderby hooks to modify the query SQL directly.

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