Dear Monks,

I am trying to process text folders as a user input. It is important for me the order of the files as they will be printed to be the same as the input.

So far and based on your help I manage to find a possible solution using two different ways 1) ARRAYS OF ARRAYS and 2) HASHES OF HASHES.

Based on what I have read online, sort should be more than enough and should keep the correct order of my keys.

Sample of working code is provided under:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::Table;
use Tie::IxHash;
use Fcntl qw( :flock );
use List::Util qw( max );
use POSIX qw( strftime );
use Data::Dumper qw( Dumper );
use constant ARGUMENTS => scalar 1;

$| = 1;

my ($value , $table);
my %hash = ();

sub hash_sub {

    foreach my $arg (@_) {

    open ( READ, "<" , $arg )
        or die ("Could not open: ".$arg." - $!\n");

    flock( READ , LOCK_EX )
        or die "Could not lock '".$arg."' - $!\n";

    if (-z "".$arg."") {
        print "File '".$arg."' is empty!\n";
        # -z  File has zero size (is empty).
    }

    my @doc_read = <READ>;

    chomp @doc_read;

    foreach $_ (@doc_read) {
        my @result = split (':', $_);

        if (/^\s*$/) { # /^\s*$/ check for "blank" lines may contain s
+paces or tabs
        next;
        }

        push (@$value , $result[3]);
    }

    $hash{$arg} = $value;
    $value = (); # emptying the string_ref for the next ARGV

    close (READ)
        or die ("Could not close: ".$arg." - $!\n");
    }

    my $max_idx = max map $#$_ , values %hash;
    
    my $tb = Text::Table->new;

    foreach my $i (0 .. $max_idx) {
    $tb->add( $i + 1 . ' ' , map $hash{$_}[$i] , sort keys %hash );
    }
    return $tb;
}

$table = hash_sub(@ARGV);

print $table;

[download]

But for example when I give the file order: sample.txt sample_2.txt sample_3.txt

File samples:

Text file sample of sample.txt:

Line_1:Line_1_1:Line_1_2:Line_1_3:Line_1_4
Line_2:Line_2_1:Line_2_2:Line_2_3:Line_2_4

[download]

Text file sample of sample_2.txt:

Line_3:Line_3_1:Line_3_2:Line_3_3:Line_3_4

[download]

Text file sample of sample_3.txt:

Line_4:Line_4_1:Line_4_2:Line_4_3:Line_4_4
Line_5:Line_5_1:Line_5_2:Line_6_3:Line_5_4
Line_6:Line_6_1:Line_6_2:Line_6_3:Line_6_4
Line_7:Line_7_1:Line_7_2:Line_7_3:Line_7_4

[download]

The output is as expected:

1  Line_1_3 Line_3_3 Line_4_3
2  Line_2_3          Line_5_3
3                    Line_6_3
4                    Line_7_3

[download]

But in case that I change the input file sequence, for example: sample_2.txt sample_3.txt sample.txt

I would expect to see:

1  Line_3_3 Line_4_3 Line_1_3
2           Line_5_3 Line_2_3
3           Line_6_3
4           Line_7_3

[download]

Unfortunately this is not happening, because the order of the keys.

I went online and I found that there is a module Tie::IxHash that could help me with the shorting process.

I tried to use in my code with the syntax like:

my $t = Tie::IxHash->new(%hash);
$t->SortByKey;
print Dumper(\$t);

[download]

But again the output was not in correct order.

At this point I am wondering, what I am doing wrong. Any suggestions or ideas would be much appreciated.

Seeking for Perl wisdom...on the process...not there...yet!

In reply to How to keep the order of keys in hash by thanos1983

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