Ok, so I took this program and and that sample input.txt, ran it, and it worked. Now I do need to levels of sort, first descending numerical and then within the equal numbers, ascending alphabetically.

I've started reading on how to use map and am a little confused, but feel like I'm close.

In this section I know that I have to declare the first character in the string such that I can then sort by it, yes? This doesn't work, but it's something close?

sub handle_section {
    my ($fh) = @_;
    my ( @entries, $line );

    while ( $line = <$fh> ) {
        last unless $line =~ m{
            ( [A-Za-z] ) # 1 first character
            ( [^(]+ )    # 2 anything except opening paren
            \s           #   space
            \(           #   opening paren
            ( \d+   )    # 3 number
        }x;

        push @entries, [ pack( 'Na*', $2, $3, $1 ), $line ];
    }

    print map  { $_->[2] }
          sort { $b->[0] cmp $a->[0] 
                    ||
                 $a->[1] cmp $b->[1]
                } @entries;

    return $line;
}

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In reply to Re^5: Use Perl's Sort to only sort certain lines in a file? by grahambuck
in thread Use Perl's Sort to only sort certain lines in a file? by grahambuck

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