Re^2: Sort then conditionally sort

I want to thank all of you for your help on this . Hi ikegami, I think your (update code) will be easier for me to eventually understand than the other code versions. I am open to any explanation/comments 1 thing I need to mention is that the data will be in an external file. Do I need to change the way your code opens up data?
That is this part

while (<DATA>)
to something like this???
========================================================
open (my $IN, 'myfile.dat') or die "$!";
my @data = <$IN>;
close $IN;
========================================================
I hope I am saying this correctly... I will also need to have all sorted data in a different file... I think something like
open (my $OUT, ">", 'output.dat') or die "$!";
then perhaps add $OUT to your print-output code
print ("$_->[0] $_->1,$_->2\n") for @data;
to
print $OUT("$_->[0] $_->1,$_->2\n") for @data;
would that work or am I out in left field? You guys a teriffic, thank you all again...

by the way is perl the best method to do this? I am curious about why there are so many languages, if 3 or 4 can do it all....Not sure if that is true tho... thx so much everyone Luke

pps Is there a way to know when I get a response from you guys, as in an email notice? peace!!!

Comment on Re^2: Sort then conditionally sort

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Re^3: Sort then conditionally sort by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 11, 2009 at 06:52 UTC
Why would think that reading a line from a file handle should be replaced with reading the entire file into an array and closing the file? By the way, my data wasn't exactly in the same format as yours. I thought the first column was actually a file name and not in the file itself. That means you'll need to adjust the input parsing and output format. would that work or am I out in left field? Yes, that's how you write to a file. I am curious about why there are so many languages, if 3 or 4 can do it all.... Because no language does it all, or does it the same way.	[reply]
Re^4: Sort then conditionally sort by lukez (Initiate) on Apr 15, 2009 at 00:10 UTC
I was wondering how to get the <DATA> to be read in to this code. I wasnt familiar with this method. So you are saying that I can read the 2 col file line by line, with the code as is? So to invoke this code - do I do something like this> Let's say this code is saved as sort_it.pl Then from a cmd line I would type c:> perl sort_it.pl myinputfile.txt Is this close? thank you in advance... Im really trying to follow this stuff.	[reply]
Re^5: Sort then conditionally sort by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 15, 2009 at 02:31 UTC
By passing the file name like that, the contents of that file will be available with `<>`, which is short for `<ARGV>`. See perlvar for `ARGV`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]