How can I sort the hash by any of those delimiters? I can sort $key, but that doesn't do the job. I need to be able to print the sorted hash by ANY bit of information.

Then a hash is probably not the data structure you want. Try an array of arrays instead. You know what is supposed to be stored in each field, right?

So the idea is that you put everything into a data structure like this (using the split function):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

# an array: 0=name, 1=number, 2=city, 3=state, 4=zip
my @customers = (
        [ 'nye, bill','39','Somehere in Cali','Colombia','12345' ],
        [ 'simpson, homer','36','Springfield', 'OR', '23456' ],
        [ 'rubble, barney','31','Bedrock','cartoon location','33456' ]
);

# set to the array field you want
my $field = '0';

my @sorted = sort { $a->[$field] cmp $b->[$field] } @customers;

map { print $_->[$field] . "\n" } @sorted;

# OUTPUT

nye, bill
rubble, barney
simpson, homer

[download]

Of course you can tweak this to print out what ever you want. This would be best as a subroutine to which you pass the sort field number, IMO.

--
Allolex

In reply to Re: Complex hash sorting by allolex
in thread Complex hash sorting by Anonymous Monk

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