Hi,

I'm a beginner's level Perl user. I want to generate some test data for comparison of a couple of sorting algorithms. At first, I want to begin by generating a test set for N integer numbers. I should be able to read them from a file to which I wrote previously.

To generate test data, I do the following: 
$array_size = <STDIN>;
chomp ($array_size);

#DEFINE NUMBER RANGE
my $range = $array_size;

open (DATASET, '>dataset.dat');

for ($count = 1; $count <= $array_size; $count++) {
     my $random_number = int(rand($range));
    print DATASET $random_number;
    if($count != $array_size){
        print DATASET "\n";
    }
}
close (DATASET);

#READ NUMBERS INTO AN ARRAY
open (DATASET, '<dataset.dat');
my @numbers = <DATASET>;
close (DATASET);

my @sorted_numbers = sort { $a <=> $b } @numbers;

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My question is that whether this method is a good way to generate the test data and then apply the sort function or is there any wrong thing here? Thank you for your help.

In reply to How to generate test data? by abdullah.yildiz

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