A solution could be to take advantage of the possibility to feed sort a reference to a sorting subroutine. That way you could check if the first element is a number (for example with $array[0] =~ /^\d+$/) and select the right subroutine:

my @array = (12,23,34,56,876,324,13) ;
# Use the array below to test for alphas
#my @array = qw(mamma ninnonnina domani festa din don dan) ;

my $sortsub ;
my $sortnum = sub { $a <=> $b } ;
my $sortalpha =  sub { $a cmp $b } ;

$sortsub = $array[0] =~ /^\d+$/ ? $sortnum : $sortalpha ;

my @sorted = sort $sortsub @array ;

print map "$_\n",@sorted ;

[download]

Note however that this approach is far from optimal in this case. In fact when the array contains alphas you replace the fast native sorting with a slower $sortalpha. This approach is better suited for selecting a sort sub in more complicated sorting.

Ciao!
--bronto

# Another Perl edition of a song:
# The End, by The Beatles
END {
  $you->take($love) eq $you->made($love) ;
}

In reply to Re: A generic sorting problem by bronto
in thread A generic sorting problem by frankus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.