Hello Perlmonks,

I am having a problem figuring out how to use the sort function within the context of one of my scripts.
Here is the code to start off with:

use strict;
use vars qw($outfile);
open(DATA, $ARGV[0]) or die "Couldn't open $ARGV[0]: $!";
$outfile = "test.txt";
open (OUT, ">$outfile") || die "Can't open $outfile for creation: $!\n
+";

my (%hash,@order);
while(<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my @bits = split /\t/;
    my $first = "$bits[0]"; 
    push @order, $first unless exists $hash{$first};
    $hash{$first} .= ' ' . "$bits[1] $bits[2]\t";
    }
print OUT "$_\t$hash{$_}" for @order;

[download]

So for example, the script takes a file that looks like this:
text1 text-a text-w
text2 text-b text-y
text3 text-x text-t
text1 text-d text-n
text3 text-f text-z
text3 text-e text-w
Output:
text1 text-a text-w text-d text-n
text2 text-b text-y
text3 text-x text-t text-f text-z text-e text-w

The problem that I am having is to just sort the concatenated data in each row.
i.e. I would like the data to look like this,

text1 text-a text-d text-n text-w
text2 text-b text-y
text3 text-e text-f text-t text-w text-x text-z

I should mention that $bits[1] is always a word and $bits[2] is always a word followed by a space then a number (e.g. dehydration 1)

Any help would greatly be appreciated,
Thank-you in advance,
Dr.J

In reply to Problems sorting by dr_jgbn

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