Hi,

I'm trying to write some simple code to sort some lines from a log file. Each line in the log file lists a message reference, and which part (out of a total count) that particular line is.

E.g.
Message reference 1, part 1 of 2
Message reference 1, part 2 of 2

I need to sort all the parts to a particular reference in ascending order and then return the log line number.

I've started work on trying to do this with perl hashes, but being a perl newbie, I'm struggling to get the return references. If anybody can help to point me in the right direction that would be much appreciated.

Using my sample code a data (below), I can currently print out
Ref: 1, parts: 1, 2, 3
Ref: 2, parts: 2, 3, 4

Ideally I want it to show
Ref 1, lines 5, 4, 6
Ref 2, lines 17, 18, 16

but I'm stuck trying to figure out how to pull out the key from %Data, given the part number associated with a reference.

Hopefully that makes some sort of sense.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my %Data = (
    04 => 'BQADAQMB  (part 2 of 3 of message reference 1)',
    05 => 'BQADAQMC  (part 1 of 3 of message reference 1)',
    06 => 'BQADAQMD  (part 3 of 3 of message reference 1)',
    16 => 'BggEAAIDAQ==  (part 4 of 3 of message reference 2)',
    17 => 'BggEAAIDAg==  (part 2 of 3 of message reference 2)',
    18 => 'BggEAAIDAw==  (part 3 of 3 of message reference 2)',
);    

my %table;

foreach my $key (sort keys %Data)
{
    my $lValue = $Data{$key};
    my @array = split ' ', $lValue;
    my $lPartStart = $array[2];
    my $lPartEnd = $array[4];
    my $lReference = $array[8];
    chop($lReference);
    $table{$lReference} = [] unless exists $table{$lReference};
    push @{$table{$lReference}}, $lPartStart;
}

foreach my $lReference (sort keys %table)
{
    print "Ref: $lReference, parts: ";
    my @parts = @{$table{$lReference}};
    print join ', ', sort @parts;
    print "\n";
}
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