Hey all, i am writing a report utility, and ended up with a sort question, regarding using sort functions. Im familiar with defining my own sort function or inline, i just cant figure out how to get this sort into a function properly.

I have a hash whose keys are some internal code. They values are hashrefs, each with 2 keys, "dept" and "count". "dept" is a count of how many departments use the code, and count is a total of the people in all those departments. I want everything sorted based on how many departments use each code.
Here's how i do it with an inline sort: 
    foreach my $code ( 
            sort { $dept_n_code{$a}->{'dept'}
               <=> $dept_n_code{$b}->{'dept'} }
            keys %dept_n_code )
    {
        my $desc = $code_map->{$code};
        my $out_line = pack $pack_template,
                        $code, $desc,
                        $dept_n_code{$code}->{'dept'},
                        $dept_n_code{$code}->{'count'};
        print REPORT "$out_line\n";
    }

[download]
Sorry about the odd code formatting, there are rather long lines for this forum.

Anyway, i couldnt figure out a reasonable way to put the sort into its own function, so that i could re-use it. Perhaps the problem is how i have structured the data.
Thanks,
shemp

In reply to Sort function issue by shemp

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