It's a brand new year and I'm a brand new member! I want to thank you all for your help here.

I've used perl mostly with regex to do text modifications on files for digital publishing. Most of this is simple search/replace phrasing. So that's most of the extent of my knowledge.

I've started in on a new project and have found myself in a quandry. I've got sections in this text file that I need to resort. They look like this:

[section start marker (shift-opt-5)] [some line of text]
entry \(frequency data\)
entry \(frequency data\)
…

[section start marker (shift-opt-5)] [and the pattern repeats]

[download]

I need to re-sort the entries (not the first line of text) in two ways, first by descending frequency and then within equal frequencies, by ascending alphabet.

I know that if I create an array of data I can do this kind of sort. Here is what I have in that regard:

sub two_way_sort {
    ($b =~ /\((\d+)/)[0] <=> ($a =~ /\((\d+)/)[0]
        ||
    lc($a)  cmp  lc($b)
}

my @unsorted_input;

while (my $line = <Input>) {
    [section here of some text edits]
    push @unsorted_input, $line;
}

my @sorted = sort two_way_sort @unsorted_input;

[download]

This code will sort the entire text file as I've placed the whole thing in an array. What I can't seem to figure out is how to create an another array into which I can place each section, do the sort, return the sorted text to the original file, and move on to the next section.

Any help you guys/gals could provide would be amazing. I'm really looking forward to growing in my understanding of Perl.

In reply to Use Perl's Sort to only sort certain lines in a file? by grahambuck

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