On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 2:33 PM, Kenneth Wolcott <kennethwolc...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi; > > I'm having trouble understanding the built-in Perl sort with regards > to mixed numbers and strings > > I'm looking at http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/sort.html > > I have an array that I want to have sorted numerically and descending. > > The array is composed of elements that look like the following regex: > > ^\d+\t\[a-zA-Z0-9]+$ > > I always have "use strict" at the top of my Perl scripts. > > If I try: > > my @articles = sort {$b <=> $a} @files; > > I get error(s)/warning(s) that the data is not numeric. > > if I try: > > my @articles = sort {$b cmp $a} @files; > > I will get numbers sorted as letters, not numerically. > > I tried to understand the sort perldoc page further down, but did > not grok it at all. > > What I did as a workaround was to implement my own extremely > brute-force sort routine, which works, but is very ugly. > > Since I have very few elements (perhaps as many as a couple dozen), > the inefficiency is immaterial. > > I'd rather that my code be correct, intuitive and elegant (and efficient). > > Thanks, > Ken Wolcott
Addendum: It appears that when the sequence of digits is the same length in all instances that the data will be sorted correctly, but when the length of the sequence of the digits is not the same in the entire data set, that is when the sort results will be incorrect. My most current data with this reverse character sort mechanism works correctly, but I'd like it to work in all cases. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
