comment on

Being as you're fairly new here, I'm not going to rag on you too much, but you need to understand something -- this site welcomes questions about Perl, but it's important to be able to explain

What you're trying to do
What result you're expecting
What result you're actually getting
What code you're using to get that result -- a complete script would be ideal.

In your case, we have a fragment of Perl that doesn't compile. This isn't helpful to us, so our answers may not be very useful to you. A complete working example of what isn't working is way more use to us.

Anyway, here's a self-contained script that works and (I think) does what you want it to:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my @data = (
    "3343df3ffdkj34j3k34j3k testfile1",
    "389k34d46hj3k493843kjj testfile2",
    "lj3l4o342u423see3u43u4 testfile3",

    #  Copied the first line to show that duplicates work.

    "3343df3ffdkj34j3k34j3k testfile4",   
);

{
    my %result;

    #  Loop through the array of lines.

    foreach my $line (@data) {

        #  Split the array element into hash value and filename.

        my ( $hashValue, $filename ) = split( /\s/, $line );

    #  Store the filename, indexed by hash value, into an array. This
    #  allows us to store multiple files with the same hash value.

        push( @{ $result{$hashValue} }, $filename );
    }

    #  Dump out the result hash, sorting by the hash values.

    foreach my $key ( sort keys %result ) {

    #  Dump out the array of filenames indexed by this hash value. We 
        #  could have sorted this list too if we wanted.

        foreach my $filename ( @{ $result{$key} } ) {

            print "$key -> $filename\n";
        }
    }
}
[download]

When this is run, it produces

tab@foobar:~dev$ perl -w 736240.pl 
3343df3ffdkj34j3k34j3k -> testfile1
3343df3ffdkj34j3k34j3k -> testfile4
389k34d46hj3k493843kjj -> testfile2
lj3l4o342u423see3u43u4 -> testfile3
[download]

I'm not sure if that's what you were looking for, but that's my solution for my best guess at what you're looking for.

Now, please note the copious (and probably unnecessary) comments and the logical variable names in my script. Your original code had an array called 'hashes'. That's only confusing initially, but it's not a great name, I would have used digests or something like that. But the biggest problem with your code is that there were no comments.

Once more, with feeling:

What you're trying to do (sort an array of hashes, except it's not an AoH, but an array of MD5 digests. Except that they also have filenames)
What result you're expecting (a list, sorted by hash value)
What result you're actually getting (we aren't told, except that it's not sorted)
What code you're using to get that result. (We got a code fragment that doesn't compile even when we clean up the braces, and the note that @array continues some data looks useful until you observe that this variable never appears in the code fragment.)

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

In reply to Re^3: Sorting an array of hashes and filenames by talexb
in thread Sorting an array of hashes and filenames by learningperl01

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