in reply to How can I group lines in a file?

zwon has pointed you in the right direction but I note that your output is not sorted by name but retains the order in which names first occured in the data. To keep that order you will need to preserve it in the hash and sort on it when printing.

use strict; use warnings; my $order = 0; my %names = (); while( <DATA> ) { my( $name, $value ) = split; $names{ $name }->{ order } = ++ $order unless exists $names{ $name }; push @{ $names{ $name }->{ values } }, $value; } print do { local $" = q{,}; qq{$_ @{ $names{ $_ }->{ values } }\n}; } for sort { $names{ $a }->{ order } <=> $names{ $b }->{ order } } keys %names; __END__ jim 14 john 23 ernest 38 matilda 43 jim 34 ernest 27 john 44 matilda 22

The output.

jim 14,34 john 23,44 ernest 38,27 matilda 43,22

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG

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Re^2: How can I group lines in a file?
by zwon (Abbot) on May 17, 2009 at 07:45 UTC

    Just want to note that you can get the same order if you sort by name length or by first value ;)

    use strict; use warnings; my %res; while (<DATA>) { my ( $name, $weight ) = split /\s+/; push @{ $res{$name} }, $weight; } for ( sort { length($a) cmp length($b) } keys %res ) { print "$_ ", join( ",", @{ $res{$_} } ), "\n"; } for ( sort { $res{$a}->[0] <=> $res{$b}->[0] } keys %res ) { print "$_ ", join( ",", @{ $res{$_} } ), "\n"; } __DATA__ jim 14 john 23 ernest 38 matilda 43 jim 34 ernest 27 john 44 matilda 22