Fellow Monks. While having a typical day fumbling around in MS access sorting some records. A co-worker comes in and asks whadia sorting by yada yada later on he says... Your lucking "they" didn't ask for you to sort by Middle initial, 2nd letter of their first name and last letter of last name.

Knowing it can be done with Perl I'd like to slap this list on his desk and say here, there you go! lol Any ideas would be helpful looking at sort, reverse and cmp but stuck on part 2nd letter of first name..

Here's an example, thanks!

INPUT
FNAME LNAME MNAME SURNAME
john,doe,sam,jr
albert,simpson
barry,white,,III
harry,potter
steve,zurk,james,sr


OUTPUT
barry,white,,III
harry,potter
albert,simpson
steve,zurk,james,sr
john,doe,sam,jr

In reply to sorta sorting fun by softworkz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.