in reply to Re: Golf: Arbitrary Alphabetical Sorting
in thread Golf: Arbitrary Alphabetical Sorting

While your $v/$k order is right, the one gotcha that I put in there was that the alphabet size was arbitrary, and not necessarily 26 characters.. it could be as many as 100, 1000, or more (Well, anything in non-Unicode above 255 makes no sense). So this trick doesn't work here.
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
  • Comment on Re: Re: Golf: Arbitrary Alphabetical Sorting

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Re: Re: Re: Golf: Arbitrary Alphabetical Sorting
by merlyn (Sage) on May 09, 2001 at 20:07 UTC
    Well, if it's a single "character", tr likes it. What's the problem? About the only thing that's messy is the use of a slash and dash, and I could probably hork that somehow by always mapping to an octal-ish escape.

    I've reread the question three times now, and I don't see how you are defining "character" in any way other than something that tr can wrangle. If so, what's the structure of a "word" then? It's no longer a string, which would be a sequence of "characters" that tr can handle!

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[reply]
      But what if the alphabet has 100 characters? Then, %m will have a through z, undef, undef, undef... as values, unless I'm missing something, which I'm pretty sure I'm not. That will lead to incorrect handling of the characters "above" 26.
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[reply]
      In your code, you prep your translation hash %m with keys from the input alphabet, and values of a through z. What if the input alphabet was [a..z1], or [a..z0-9]? These are more than 26 characters and thus, the 27th and higher characters will have null values for their keys, and will mess up your tr-and-back transformation.
      Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
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