On Jun 22, Aaron Lawson said:
> 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.
Two things:
1. finding the NAME of a scalar is the wrong way to do things -- find
the NAME of a key in a hash, instead
2. generally, the easiest way to find the largest value in a list is to
go through them one by one and stop when you find the largest ;)
But seriously, the easiest way to find the max in a list is:
my $max; # it is undef right now
for (@list) { $max = $_ if !defined($max) or $_ > $max }
The hash idea would change your data to:
%data = (
financial => 6,
sports => 3,
foreign_affairs => 8,
politics => 2,
human_interest => 5,
);
Then you would do:
my $max;
for (keys %data) {
$max = $_ if !defined($max) or $data{$_} > $data{$max};
}
Notice how I changed the if condition slightly -- you want to STORE the
name, but COMPARE via the hash-value.
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