Hi all! I am sill learning Perl, and have just installed ActivePerl on my Windows machine.

I am trying to open a text file with multiple lines containing names and phone numbers. They are split by the pipe symbol "|".

I am trying to open the file and sort the file by the phone number (second part in the array), but still keep the name before the number...
Zoe|123-4567
Andrew|123-4568

Ideally, I want to open the file, read contents, sort, write them again, then close. Can I do this? Do I have to write to a new file? Here is what I am doing (and it is NOT working...) 

my $whatever;
my @sortedarray;

open(SORTED, ">sorted.txt");
open(TOSORT, "tosort.txt");

while ($whatever = <TOSORT>) {
  chomp $whatever;
  my @sortedarray = split(/\|/, $whatever);
  
  #@sortedarray = sort($sortedarray[1]);
  
  print SORTED "$sortedarray[0]|$sortedarray[1]\n";
}

close(TOSORT);
close(SORTED);

print "done!";
exit;

[download]
I know it must be VERY simple, but I am just confusing myself more!!! :(

In reply to sorting arrays... by iamrobj

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