I am a bit stumped.

I have two files. Each file has several columns delimited by single space. There is a leading whitespace. I am only interested in columns 1 and 2. Column 1 is made up of names while column 2 is cholesterol level.

Some names are in both files, so I only want to focus on those names in both.

Knowing this, I have decided that a hash of arrays is an appropriate data structure, so my data is organized as:

Patient 
Cholesterol level

John Kay 
151 128

Sally Gi 
174 145

[download]

There are other patients.

Using the split function, I can designate columns 1 and 2 as various variables, so column 1 = $patient (key) and column two = $level (value) for %health.

I can push $level into an array like so: push (@{($health{$patient}}, $level); However, what if I want to do something with each cholesterol list for each patient? For example, if I wanted to list the levels from lowest to highest, would I use a loop in which I can write:  @levelssorted = sort {$a <=> $b} @{($health{$patient}); and the level numbers for each patient would then be from lowest to highest?

Any help is welcome. Thank you.

In reply to Push Function and Hash by eepvesity

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