ikegami-

This is an extremely interesting discussion for me, thanks for staying with it.

It seems that my perception is that the first field is not being treated the same, and I'm wishing it was.

I'm starting to understand that your perception is that it is being treated the same.

I offer this bit of code to try and show my perspective: 

use strict;
use warnings;

use Sort::Fields;
use Data::Dumper;

my @data = `ls -ls | tail -5`; chomp(@data);
print "Field 1 sort:\n", Dumper(fieldsort( ['1n'], @data));

@data = `ls -l | tail -5`; chomp(@data);
print "Field 5 sort:\n", Dumper(fieldsort( ['5n'], @data));

[download]
The field 1 sort is not sorted at all. We know why, we've been beating that poor horsie all afternoon.

The field 5 sort is sorted correctly. Only because field 1 didn't have any leading spaces in any of the lines.

What I'm hearing you say is "As long as there are no leading spaces in field 1, Sort::Fields will treat all fields the same way".

What I believe I'm saying is "If Sort::Fields can handle initial spaces in field 5, why does it handle initial spaces in field 1 differently?".

Is that a fair assessment?

In reply to Re^6: Bug in Sort::Fields? by cmv
in thread Split(), Initial Spaces, & a limit? by cmv

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.