Are you trying to do the following?

foreach my $symbol_set (sort keys %pnl_ind) {
      my $symbols_r=$pnl_ind{$symbol_set);
      foreach my $symbol (sort ($symbols_r->{$a}{'pnl'}<=>$symbols_r->
+{$b}{'pnl'}) keys %{$symbols_r} ) {
         ... etc
[download]

Thank you very much for your help on this. Your solution worked perfectly. tevads

excellent, glad to help... do you see everything that is going on there?
                - Ant

++ for you for that answer. I have a question...

I thought I was in the twilight zone earlier when I came to perlmonks to put down a question about sorting multidimensional hashes and the top question here was just that!

here's mine...
I have a 4 dimensional hash something like this: $logdata->{$log}->{$line}->{$category} = $value and I need to sort at the $log level by the value of a particular $category.
I already know what categories I need to sort by but don't want to write different subs for each.
My attempt went something like...

    for my $log ( sort {
                           if (!$query->param('merge')) { $a cmp $b }
                           else { # it's merged so we have to sort at 
+log level rather than line level
                               if ($query->param('sortby') eq 'time_as
+c') {
                                   for my $line ( keys %{$logdata->{$l
+og}} ) {
                                       my $timeA = $logdata->{$a}->{$l
+ine}->{'time'};
                                       my $timeB = $logdata->{$b}->{$l
+ine}->{'time'};
                                       $timeA cmp $timeB;
                                   }
                               }
                               elsif ($query->param('sortby') eq 'time
+_des') {
                                   for my $line ( keys %{$logdata->{$l
+og}} ) {
                                       my $timeA = $logdata->{$a}->{$l
+ine}->{'time'};
                                       my $timeB = $logdata->{$b}->{$l
+ine}->{'time'};
                                       $timeB cmp $timeA;
                                   }
                               }
                           }
                       } keys %$logdata ) {
        my $loglines = $logdata->{$log};
        for my $line ( sort keys %$loglines ) {
[download]

but since I am all "use strict;"-ed up, Perl moans that $log needs an explicit package name for $log in the for my $line ( keys %{$logdata->{$log}} ) { lines. This is more complicated than anything I have had to do to date and this is where I got stuck.

Against my better judgement I tried a foreach my $log (keys %$logdata) { above the two lines mentioned in the last paragraph but the output was not quite what I was looking for (a bunch of empty lines inamongst the UNsorted output).

I have a solution - make the first key in %$logdata "$log|$line" and remove a level from the hash but I figure there has to be a way to do this properly. Any help would be much appreciated.

larryk

Ok, first of all... you should put a sort that large in a subroutine, just for simplicity's sake...

for(sort sort_sub @foo) ...

sub sort_sub { 
  $a <=> $b;
}
[download]

Similar to that... make your code MUCH more readable :)

Perl moans about $log not being there because it isn't... $log isn't filled until after the sort is done... your $log data is in $a and $b.

So, let me get this straight... you want to sort at the first level of your hash, by a key in the 3rd level of your hash? The problem I see in this is... I assume you have many lines (i.e. $line data)? If that is true, then how do you find the category you need under many lines? Or is there just one line that has a 'time' category, and that is the one you need?

Can you give a small example of what your hash looks like?
                - Ant