A plain old hash is an unordered container. Sorting the keys does not sort the container, it just gives you a sorted list of keys to work with. The underlying container is unaffected by your sort operation. The order you are seeing when you dump the structure is unreliable and should not be thought of as ordered.

If you need output to be in a specific order you probably need to sort on output. I assume your goal is not to get Data::Dumper to output in a sorted order, but it does serve as a good example: By setting $Data::Dumper::Sortkeys = sub { ... }, you can control the sort order of the data being dumped. The trick will be to compose a subroutine that detects which levels should be sorted, and which should not, and that applies the sort algorithm that you've used in your example code only when appropriate.

So that's how it could be done with Data::Dumper. Your specific use case will be different, but the idea is similar; rather than relying on the hash to be in a particular order, assure that you deal with its elements in the order you prefer.


Dave

In reply to Re: Sort Hash of hashes by davido
in thread Sort Hash of hashes by lobs

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