I have created many large, complex, and ultimately problematic data structures. I am trying to find a way to index these structures to make for quicker and easier searching. I would like to start by asking your help with a fairly simple one. Hopefully I'll learn enough to tackle the others myself. Here is an example of a structure: 
$a[1]{total} = 10;
$a[2]{total} = 50;
$a[3]{total} = 40;
$a[4]{total} = 30;
$a[5]{total} = 20;

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I would to end up with a new array that holds the indexes of the @a array sorted by the values for the hash key total. For example: 
$b[1] == 2; #$a[2]{total} = 50
$b[2] == 3; #$a[3]{total} = 40
$b[3] == 4; #$a[4]{total} = 30
$b[4] == 5; #$a[5]{total} = 20
$b[5] == 1; #$a[1]{total} = 10

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I just can't seem to get a grip on this one.

In reply to Indexing a data structure by ChrisR

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