i'm not sure of your requirements. you say you need unique keys... is that because there may be two "keith"s? what if they each get a 90? in your implementation, they're still not unique. or is it because rob and john might both get a 52? if this is a hash value, then there isn't a uniqueness problem.

if the name alone is good for uniqueness, you can use this simple short method, which works with the data you provided.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
$|++;


my @names_marks = ( 'cliff 76', 'john 52', 'keith 90', 'rob 52' );

my %hash = map { split } @names_marks;

my @sorted_names = sort { $hash{$b} <=> $hash{$a} } keys %hash;
print $hash{$_},' ',$_,$/ for @sorted_names;

[download]
also, your code 
foreach (@names_marks) {
  ($names[$_], $marks[$_]) = split / /, $_;
  $hash{"$marks[$_]".$names[$_]} = ucfirst($names[$_]). " " . $marks[$
+_];
}

[download]
is not correct. $_ contains the value from @names_marks, not the index. so you're trying to access $names[keith], which isn't numeric. you cannot ignore these warnings, your code is broken.

anytime you think 'unique', think hash. i don't think you need arrays at all, but you might know something i don't.

~Particle ;Þ

In reply to Re: sort hash elements... by particle
in thread sort hash elements... by kiat

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