I have made a perl script that sorts through a hotline log, grabs the name of the file that was downloaded, writes the name to the key of a hash, then writes the count to the hash value. When it's done counting, the script then generates the start of an html page and a table. Inside that, the script loops through the values and keys spitting out the necessary <tr> tags. Finally, it closes the table and closes the html tags. Below is just the loop from my script that generates the individual table entries. (I had to take out a lot of the HTML tags so it would be accepted.) 
foreach $key (sort {$freqpage{$b} <=> $freqpage{$a}} keys %freqpage)
	{
	    print HOTFILES "$freqpage{$key}\n"; 
	    print HOTFILES "$key \n"; 
	}
Everything works great except when it's done I have an HTML page with ~1800 table entries. I'd like to trim this list down to just the top 20 files downloaded instead of a 900k download/redraw hell page. How do I limit foreach? I think using a while() or for() wouldn't work because one iteration would still trigger the aforementioned foreach() loop that would *then* go through all the files. I'm out of ideas. Anyone have a suggestion?

In reply to Limits on a foreach loop by ritz0

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.