Hi Monks.

I imagine that there is a good, accepted way to do this, but it seems that I can't find the right words to bash in to google.

Copying from the O'REILLY "Programming Perl" book (and simplifying a bit), I have, for example : 

sub prospects {
  $b->{SALARY} <=> $a->{SALARY}
    ||
  $b->{HEIGHT} <=> $a->{HEIGHT}
    ||
  $b->{AGE} <=> $a->{AGE}
}

@sorted = sort prospects @recs

[download]

Now, I inderstand that, but I wand to be able to sort on different fields, and potentially a different number of fields. I'd like to be able to pass the keys to be sorted on to a sub somehow. I could do it with, e.g., maximum 10 fields allowed for, but I would like it to work with any number of fields. I can't work out how to do it without an eval, which I'd like to avoid.

Ideally I would like to be able to use different sort operators / subs with each key, perhaps by passing my function an array something like : 

[
 { 
   KeyName => 'SALARY',
   SortType => '<=>' 
 },
 { 
   KeyName => 'FIRST_NAME',
   SortType => 'cmp'
 }
]

[download]

So I basically want to make a function that is used like :

@sorted_hash_ref = flexible_sort( \@unsorted_hash_refs, \@sort_config );

Apologies for poor terminology etc. Thanks in advance!

In reply to sort by variable, configurable fields by Tharg

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