Greetings, Monks. I'm a struggling novice who has recently completed the exercises in the "Learning Perl" book. In an effort to further my perl knowledge, I've been devising small challenges for myself to complete, most pertaining to hashes (since I'm a bit fuzzy in that regard). I'm now seeking to interchange the smallest hash value of a hash with the largest hash value. Here's my code: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my %hash = (Matt => 24,
            Dana => 19,
            Eric => 28,
            Sara => 20,
            John => 17,
            Mike => 23,);

print Dumper \%hash;

my @sort = sort {$hash{$a} <=> $hash{$b}} keys %hash;
my $temp = $hash{$sort[scalar @sort - 1]};
$hash{$sort[scalar @sort - 1]} = $hash{$sort[0]};
$hash{$sort[0]} = $temp;

print Dumper \%hash;

[download]

This accomplishes what I want (interchanging the key John value with the key Eric value), but seems rather cumbersome. Is the array of sorted keys by value (@sort) really necessary? I'm seeking a more elegant solution. Thanks for any help.

Matt

In reply to Interchanging hash values by mjab

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.