Re^3: Reformat Text File

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Re^4: Reformat Text File by ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 05, 2004 at 17:36 UTC
`bah,valueA foo,valueB foo,valueC bar,valueD` [download] results in `bah,valueA bar,valueD foo,valueB,valueC` [download] and not `bah,valueA foo,valueB,valueC bar,valueD` [download] Therefore, merlyn assumes they are sorted (or assumes the order of the lines in the result doesn't matter, but then why call sort?).	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: Reformat Text File by tall_man (Parson) on Oct 05, 2004 at 20:17 UTC
I presume the problem has been simplified from an original case with meaningful keys in some meaningful order. Say the keys were dates in some odd format: `July 21,Milestone meeting August 3,First walkthrough August 3,Committee meeting September 12,Second walkthrough` [download] merlyn puts all the values into a hash and then does a straight sort on the keys. That would make "August 3" come before "July 21" in my example. Rather than work out a fancy sorting routine for dates (or whatever the keys might be), my example maintains the original order of the first appearance of each key.	[reply] [d/l]