in reply to (tye)Re: Sorting strings ("natural sort" w/ negatives)
in thread Sorting strings

mmhhh, breaks on this my @deltas= qw( -1h0m -1h10m -0h50m );

-- Hofmator

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(tye)Re2: Sorting strings ("natural sort" w/ negatives)
by tye (Sage) on Aug 31, 2001 at 22:49 UTC

    Yes. Sorry, I should have realized that a "natural sort" doesn't handle that (the negative sign distributes across to the minutes field but the "natural sort" is not aware of this).

    Though you can still use a natural sort, you just have to process the leading sign separately. For example:

    my @deltas= qw( -6h0m -0h42m +0h18m -12h50m +11h39m 0h2m +1h7m -12h8m -0h25m 0h0m ); @deltas= do { my( @sort, %sort )= map { local($_)= $_; my $sign= s#^([-+]?)## && $1; s#(\d+)# "\x80" ^ pack"N",$sign.$1 #ge; $_; } @deltas; @sort{@sort}= @deltas; @sort{ sort @sort }; }; print "@deltas\n";

    Though just for fun I switched from an index sort to a key sort so this version drops identical values. (:

            - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")