...searching for natural sort

Thanks! I had not heard that term before. That will be very useful.

Though I'm a little curious why your integer indices are used to index a hash not an array.

That's a really good question & embarassingly, I have no good technical answer. I suspect it is both because this is recycled code that I'm reworking to handle a larger data set, and the original keys were not integers; and because I work with hashes so much more than arrays that it's just a more comfortable method for me.

Thanks for pointing that out - I will re-think how I'm handling this data structure.

Update:After dinking around with this a bit: The integer index is an important key into other data structures (it's an ifIndex, if you are familiar with SNMP MIB-II). This was not obvious from my small example, sorry. The indices are not always sequential - often a few (or several, gah!) are missing here and there. For me, it's clearer (and therefore easier to maintain) to think of the integer as a hash key. Trying to work with an array for that was a very interesting exercise, thanks. :)

In reply to Re^2: best practices for a complex sort + splitting an alphanumeric string (natural) by gabrielle
in thread best practices for a complex sort + splitting an alphanumeric string by gabrielle

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