I have been a bit naughty in assuming that it's OK to use 
my ($first, $sort, $second, $tail) = split(/\s+/, $_);

[download]
to replace your: 
m/^(\w+)\s+(\d+)\s+(\w+)(.*)$/

[download]
Because if you have multiple spaces immediately after $second they will be lost - but as you're putting the data into HTML table cells this shouldn't be an issue.

NB: I used split(/\s+/, $_) and not split(' ', $_) because you were matching /^(\w+), which may just have been for efficiency and anchoring, but I don't know that you didn't need to make sure that there was no leading white space on the line in the input file.

I have not used GrandFather's map because I needed to do quite a lot to the elements returned by the sort (the tests on $sort and the sprintf) and it looked like it was going to be messy and possibly difficult trying to fit it all in there.

I like map, but I tend to shy away from using it for more than the most basic usage - I know 95%+ of the people I've ever worked with who have to deal with Perl would not be able to understand how the map worked, but could all unroll a foreach loop if they needed to change the code after I had moved on to my next contract. 

use strict;
use warnings;

my $buffer;

my $input = "input.dat";

my %colour = (

   'lt_90'  => '#00FF00',
   'lt_180' => '#FF6600',
   'gt_179' => '#FF0000'

);

my @lines;

open( INPF, $input ) or die "Can't read '$input': $!\n";
while (<INPF>) {

    my ($first, $sort, $second, $tail) = split(/\s+/, $_);

    if ( defined $tail && $sort =~ /^\d+$/ ) {

        push(@lines, [$first, $sort, $second, $tail]);

    } else {

        # die "Unable to match any lines: $!\n";

        # Do you really want to die with $! here?
        # There wasn't an error, just a failed test,
        # so $! won't have a relevant message in it.
        # (I get "Bad file descriptor" YMMV on your OS?)
        # Perhaps you want something like:

        chomp();
        die "line: '$_' does not match input format\n";

    }

}
close (INPF);

for my $line ( sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] } @lines ) {

    my ($first, $sort, $second, $tail) = @{$line};

    my $colour = "gt_179";

    if ( $sort < 90 ) {

        $colour = "lt_90";

    }
    elsif ( $sort < 180 ) {

        $colour = "lt_180";

    }

    $buffer .= sprintf (
        "<tr bgcolor='%s'><td>%s</td><td>%s</td><td>%s</td><td>%s</td>
+</tr>\n",
        $colour{$colour}, $first, $sort, $second, $tail);

}

print "$buffer";

[download]

In reply to Re: most efficient buffer sort by serf
in thread most efficient buffer sort by Anonymous Monk

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