Why not use the time stamp as the key then you can order output in a sane fashion:

use strict; use warnings; my @dateFields = qw(year month day hour minute); my @itemKeys = qw(burgers fries sodas); my %sales = ( makeEntry( 'day' => 1, 'month' => 1, 'year' => 2000, 'hour' => 4, 'minute' => 44, 'burgers_sold' => 5, 'fries_sold' => 3, 'sodas_sold' => 11 ), makeEntry( 'day' => 1, 'month' => 1, 'year' => 2000, 'hour' => 4, 'minute' => 45, 'burgers_sold' => 2, 'fries_sold' => 4, 'sodas_sold' => 7 ), ); for my $key (sort keys %sales) { print "$key\n"; printf " %-7s %s\n", $_, $sales{$key}{"${_}_sold"} for @itemKeys +; } sub makeEntry { my (%entry) = @_; return sprintf ("%04d/%02d/%02d %02d:%02d:00", @entry{@dateFields}), \%entry; }

Prints:

2000/01/01 04:44:00 burgers 5 fries 3 sodas 11 2000/01/01 04:45:00 burgers 2 fries 4 sodas 7
Perl is the programming world's equivalent of English

In reply to Re: Use a hashref as a key in another hashref? by GrandFather
in thread Use a hashref as a key in another hashref? by mwb613

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.