slloyd has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

How do I sort an array of text values, ignoring case? 
use strict;
my @items=qw(A B C a b c);
@items=sort(@items);
foreach my $item (@items){
    print "$item\n";
    }

[download]
Desired output:
A
a
B
b
C
c

[download]

-------------------------------
by me
http://www.basgetti.com
http://www.kidlins.com

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: sorting text arrays and ignoring case
by matze (Friar) on Mar 09, 2006 at 23:57 UTC
    You can convert the array elements to lowercase while comparing them. With 
    @items=sort { lc($a) cmp lc($b) } (@items);

    [download]
    your code prints: 
    A
a
B
b
C
c

    [download]

    Update: sort lists this with uc as example.
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      That's not guaranteed to return the mentioned result. How about: 
      @items = sort { lc($a) cmp lc($b) || $a cmp $b } @items;

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: sorting text arrays and ignoring case
by GrandFather (Saint) on Mar 10, 2006 at 00:07 UTC

    A few other ways of writing out the contents of the array:

    print "@items\n";
print join ('\n', @items), "\n";
print "$_\n" for @items;

    [download]
    DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel
[reply]
[d/l]
      Or how about

      {
    local $" = "\n";
    print "@items\n";
}

      [download]

      to get one item per line?

      Cheers,

      JohnGG

[reply]
[d/l]

        Nope, all in a line with spaces between items. But a trick worth knowing.

        Update: the node I replied to seems to have completely chenged its contents. My reply is no longer relevant.

        DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel
[reply]

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