I am very new to hashes (as well as Perl) and am having some difficulty with a cgi script. This script allows individuals to post "announcements" via a form. The form data is stored in a text file, sorted in descending order by date, and printed to the html page. However, the script is currently sorting by the month and not by the year, thus creating a problem when news items are posted from 2002. (01/01/02 news items are being printed below 12/01/01 news items)
Here is a sample of the text file that the data is stored in: http://is-blah.com/corprate/pages/news/cafeteria_closed.htm ~ 10/24/01 ~ Cafeteria closed Here is a snippet of code from the cgi script that sorts the file: # Hash to sort date $from = "tmc.dat"; my %h; open(FILE, "$from") || die "Can't open $from!\n"; while (<FILE>) { chomp; ($announcement,$date,$description) = split(/~/,$_); # if the date has already been seen, tack this entry on to the hash value if( $h{$date} ){ $h{$date} .= "|$announcement~$description"; } # date hasn't been seen, so create a new hash entry else { $h{$date} = "$announcement~$description"; } } #sort the dates in desc. order foreach $key (sort {$b cmp $a} keys %h) { #do for each item for that date @items = split '\|', $h{$key}; foreach $item (@items) { #split back out the values and print the table my($announcement,$description) = split /~/,$item; print "<table width=800><tr>"; print "<td><img border=0 width=14 height=14 id='_x0000_i1027' src='http://is-web/corprate/gifs/blueball.gif'>"; print "<ALIGN='left'><span style='font-size:13.5pt'><a href=\"$announcement\"><font color=blue>$description</font></a>(<font color=black> $key)</font></td>"; print "</tr></table><br>"; I would appreciate any assistance in figuring out how to sort by year, then by month. Thank you. Dale
