print $b = $a;

It isn't immediately obvious to me what you expect this statement to do. What it actually does is to extract the value from $a, store it in $b and then print it. What did you intend?

Other things you might be interested to know:

• while takes a logical expression to evaluate and you have not given it one.
• $a and $b are not good choices for variable names especially when using sort.
• The ordering of keys within hashes is not a trivial thing.
• You never need double brackets around one expression in Perl.

It might be better all round for you to provide your expected output because it's not at all clear to me what your code is intended to do.

Err... I'm not sure of what you're going for, with your code.

However, if you wish to print the contents of your hash in the order of its keys, then:

for my $key (sort keys %hash) {
    print "The key '$key' is associated to the value '$hash{$key}'\n";
}

If you wish to print the contents of your hash in the order of its CONTENTS (not of its keys), then yes, you need a custom sort method. The following code is merely an adaptation of an example found on the Perl "sort" documentation page:

for my $key (sort { $hash{$b} <=> $hash{$a} } keys %hash) {
    print "The key '$key' is associated to the value '$hash{$key}'\n";
}

However, please consider performance when doing so: If you merely need to access it once, then the sort method is fine. If you need it ordered by value, and accessed a lot of times, then a reverse hash might be the solution. In this case, if you may have multiple instances of the same value, you might have collisions, and thus, will need to store references to lists containing the different values.

Hi lakshmikant,

In addition to what the others have said, have a look at "Data: Hashes" in perlfaq4, especially "How do I process an entire hash?" and "How do I sort a hash (optionally by value instead of key)?".

Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D

Add,

then run your code ?

"my" variable %hash masks earlier declaration in same scope at testt.pl line 14.
syntax error at testt.pl line 12, near "while{"
Can't use "my $a" in sort comparison at testt.pl line 17.

Hashes are not ordered, but as usual, CPAN offers a solution: Tie::IxHash