On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 09:14:19AM -0400, Aaron Lawson wrote:
> Hi,
> I have a perl problem that seems like it should have a simple and
> easy solution but that I can't figure out. I am trying to determine which
> of a set of scalars has the highest numeric value and then to get the NAME
> of the scalar (not the value) to use this to tell a user what kind of file
> they're dealing with. Basically, the output of a long series of
> calculations that analyzes newswire ends up with 5 numeric values (these
> are scores for each domain): $financial, $sports, $foreigh_affairs,
> $politics, $human_interest. These five scalars are floating point numbers,
> as I said, I'm just looking for some way of figuring out which has the
> highest value and returning the name of the variable.
>
> Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
Consider putting the data in a hash. (Possibly it should have been
there to start with.)
my $top = (sort { $hash{$a} <=> $hash{$b} } keys %hash)[0];
Or something like that.
It's not terribly efficient if you have lots of values, but it's simple
and with 5 values you won't notice it.
--
Paul Johnson - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pjcj.net
