First of all, let me thank everyone involved with this site for maintaining a worthwhile place in on the net.

The problem I'm having is of the "sort" variety. The snippet of code below seems to work fine when sorting numbers or strings. However, it doesn't seem to recognize any kind of descending order sorting.

I am really only concerned with sorting numbers, as in the "else if" statement. When I invert $a and $b, such as:

$result = $b_items[$item_no] <=> $a_items[$item_no];}

it still sorts them as ascending.


Thanks in advance. 
sub sort_func
{
    #local($a, $b) = @_;
    my(@a_items) = split("\t", $a,$datafields);
    my(@b_items) = split("\t", $b, $datafields);
    my($item_no) = $sort;            # the number of the field to 
                        # sort on.
    my($result) = 0;            # default is equal
    
    if ($sortby eq "string"){
        $result = $a_items[$item_no] cmp $b_items[$item_no]; }
        
     elsif ($sortby eq "number"){
        $result = $a_items[$item_no] <=> $b_items[$item_no];} 
        return($result);
}

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In reply to Descending Sort by Devo

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