Listing states in Alphabetical order

[never_rain]

I am using the following query to list the states. However, the result is not in alphabetical order. here is the query that I am using.

$xml = 'http://api.geonames.org/search?featureCode=ADM1&maxRows=100&country=US&username=demo order by ADM1 asc';

I was told by someone on the forum that the results are displayed based on the relevance and I have to do it by myself. I am not sure how can I sort them other then a query. Do you know how to fix this up or probably is there any example.

Thanks,

Faisal