See perlfaq4 on How do I sort an rray (by anything)?

I would reorganize your array of hashes, such that the numbers were hash elements with a fixed keyname,that would make the sorting simpler, I think. Otherwise you have to sort the keys of each each hash in each array element. And because you have multiple keys, some of which are words, you'd only want to sort the keys that you were able to pass off as numbers... which would require some kind of funky stuff that makes me cringe. :)

What if you organized your hash like such?

@Aname=(
         {
            keynum => 200,
            keyname => 'hello',
            name =>'akshay'
         },
         {
            keynum => 100,
            keyname => 'world',
            name =>'india'
         },
         {
            keynum => 150,
            keyname => 'great',
            name =>'ahm'
         },
  );
[download]

  my @sortedAname = sort {$a->{keynum} <=> $b->{keynum}} (@Aname);
[download]

Anyhoo... that's what I'd do to simplify the sorting...

--Ray

PS. Also you don't want to assign @Aname with [], that means you're assigning An array of one element, which is a reference to an array. You want to assign the @array using () (list of actual values, not a reference to one). (Corrected in my code above...)

To print out the data:

print "#keynum, keyname, name\n";
print "$_->{'keynum'}, $_->{'keyname'}, $_->{'name'}\n" for @sortedAna
+me;
[download]

How could I optimize the repetitive $_->{'<key>'} structure?

Have a nice day, j

Use a hash slice.

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ perl -E '
> @arr = (
>    {
>       keynum  => 50,
>       keyname => q{fruit},
>       name    => q{plum},
>    },
>    {
>       keynum  => 100,
>       keyname => q{fish},
>       name    => q{cod},
>    },
>    {
>       keynum  => 200,
>       keyname => q{fowl},
>       name    => q{duck},
>    },
>    );
> printf qq{%10s%10s%10s\n}, qw{ #keynum keyname name };
> printf qq{%10d%10s%10s\n}, @$_{ qw{ keynum keyname name } }
>    for @arr;'
   #keynum   keyname      name
        50     fruit      plum
       100      fish       cod
       200      fowl      duck
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$
[download]

I hope this is helpful.

Cheers,

JohnGG

How could I optimize ...

Note that johngg's approach of Re^3: sort in array of hash required is not an 'optimization' in the sense of execution speed; I doubt it would run significantly, if at all, faster.

However, it offers, IMHO, potential significant advantages in terms of maintainability. E.g., the group of keys  keynum keyname name can be factored out (if you could get rid of that pesky '#' that's buzzing around in there) into an array definition (possibly made a constant) and used in many places without concern for having 'forgotten something'. If it becomes necessary to change anything about this group of keys, it is only necessary to do so in one place.

@Aname = map {$_->[0]} sort {$a->[1] <=> $b->[1]} map {
    [$_, sort {$a <=> $b} grep {/^\d+$/} keys %$_]
} @Aname;
[download]

This will sort by the smallest integer key in each @Aname element. If there will only ever be a single key you can omit the sort in front of the grep.

/me starts cringing... ;)

(This is exactly what I was referring to (see my above reply)... :-)

I bow to your amazing PerlMonk Brain, Grandfather.