in reply to Sorting large sets of geometric coordinates

I'm not 100% clear on column priorities, so I'm kind of guessing the following, and you can tell us if I'm wrong:

Priority: 3rd 1st 2nd 4th ((1.0 0.1)(99.0 0.2))

Much of that is nothing but a guess. But let's assume it's accurate so that you can see an example of how you might handle the sorting:

my @coordinates_unsorted; while ( <DATA> ) { push @coordinates_unsorted, [ m/([\d.]+)/g ]; } my( @coordinates_sorted ) = sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] or $a->[2] <=> $b->[2] or $a->[0] <=> $b->[0] or $a->[3] <=> $b->[3] } @coordinates_unsorted; foreach my $coordinate_ref ( @coordinates_sorted ) { printf "((%2.1f %2.1f) (%2.1f %2.1f))\n", @{$coordinate_ref}; }

An adaptation on that theme ought to work out for you.

And here is essentially the same thing, but using a Schwartzian Transform. ...in this case, readability suffers, IMHO.

my( @coordinates_sorted ) = map{ sprintf "((%2.1f %2.1f) (%2.1f %2.1f))\n", @{$_} } sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] or $a->[2] <=> $b->[2] or $a->[0] <=> $b->[0] or $a->[3] <=> $b->[3] } map{ [ m/([\d.]+)/g ] } <DATA>; { local $, = "\n"; print @coordinates_sorted; }

Dave