ACJavascript has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello All I SEEK THE PERL MONKS WISDOM!!

Okay hers my problem.
I have a simple database setup like so

Item1|Item2|Item3

Now I do a simple search on it like so: 
@results=grep(/$searchString/i,@da);
 if($#results >= 0){
  foreach $i(@results){
    ($item1,$item2,$item3) = split(/\|/,$i);

[download]


It then prints out the results if there are any.

Okay now say $item one is a price - 35.00.. Now I want the search results to be printed out from lowest to highest.

The problem here is if im using a database and it goes there each line one by one,, and the first one is 100 dollars and the 5th is 1.00 dollar how can I get it to write out the first one after its past it.

I know this sounds very confusing its been buging me for a while now. Please can someone help!!

Thanks in advance!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: How to place Search Results!!!
by Mr. Muskrat (Canon) on Aug 04, 2003 at 21:24 UTC
    perldoc -f sort
[reply]
Re: How to place Search Results!!!
by diotalevi (Canon) on Aug 04, 2003 at 21:23 UTC

    Sort the results by your dollar cost.

[reply]
      Hey Thanks all for your advice!
      I will be trying it all!
[reply]
Re: How to place Search Results!!!
by sgifford (Prior) on Aug 05, 2003 at 02:39 UTC

    Sort the results array. The most fun way to do it is something like: 

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use vars qw(@results);
@results = ("Bean Burrito|0.69|5",
            "Seven-Layer Burrito|1.39|8",
            "Pintos -n- cheese|0.59|0",
);

sub numerically_by_item
{
  my($which)=@_;
  return sub { (split(/\|/,$a))[$which] <=> (split(/\|/,$b))[$which] }
}

sub alpha_by_item
{
  my($which)=@_;
  return sub { (split(/\|/,$a))[$which] cmp (split(/\|/,$b))[$which] }
}

my $sortby;

print "Sorted by price\n";
$sortby = numerically_by_item(1);
print join("\n",sort $sortby @results);
print "\n\n";

print "Sorted by name\n";
$sortby = alpha_by_item(0);
print join("\n",sort $sortby @results);
print "\n\n";

print "Sorted by messiness\n";
$sortby = numerically_by_item(2);
print join("\n",sort $sortby @results);
print "\n\n";

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
      Hey sgifford, The code you presented gave me some errors. But i think I know were your going with it.

      I was thinking. Would this work.

      1. User Types in string.
      2. The string is checked searchs through the database. 3. Any results are then pushed into a Hash or Array 4. Then the array (hash) is sorted by least price. 5. then printed out.

      Would that work??

      A*C
[reply]

        That's odd that it gave you errors. I just re-ran it, and it worked fine.

        Anyways, yes, I think what you're thinking will work.

        If your flat-file database gets very large, you'll want to look at using a db or dbm database, or maybe SQL. Searches will get slower as the number of items in the flatfile grows.

[reply]

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