The problem I have with your solution isn't so much the "cleanness", as well its inefficiency. You will be checking for direction for every comparison made by the sort - instead of checking it once.

I would do something like (untested): 

my @sorted_keys = 
    sort {$hash{$a}{$orderby} <=> $hash{$b}{$orderby} ||
          $hash{$a}{$orderby} cmp $hash{$b}{$orderby} 
    keys %hash;
@sorted_keys = reverse @sorted_keys if $direction eq "DESC";
foreach my $id (@sorted_keys) {
    print "$id - $hash{$id}{$orderby}\n";
}

[download]
Although I vastly prefer to keep a mapping of which keys are numbers and which aren't, and don't do two tests for each non-numeric pair of keys you encounter. (Not to mention that your non-numeric entries happen to have strings that start with a number, it's going to treat them as numbers). And if I didn't I'd use a GRT to avoid the sort block. But I disgress.

Perl --((8:>*

In reply to Re: sort direction by Perl Mouse
in thread sort direction by rsiedl

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