Chances are good that by virtue of how the numeric data is getting into your script, Perl is seeing '1e-13' as a string, not a number. You can see this happening here: 

perl -e "print q/2e+11/, $/; print 2e+11, $/;"

[download]

You can coerce it back to a number by treating it like one. One way is by adding zero to it: 

perl -e "print q/2e+11/ + 0, $/;"

[download]

And here is that theory applied to an example that may more closely resemble your problem code.

my @numbers;
while( my $num = <DATA> ) {
    chomp $num;
    push @numbers, $num + 0;
}
print "$_\n" for sort { $a <=> $b } @numbers;
__DATA__
1e-13
2e-18
1e-11

[download]

I hope this is on the right track. ;)


Dave

In reply to Re: sorting scientific numbers by davido
in thread sorting scientific numbers by smahajan

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