Hello Perl monks, I am in need of some sorting cleverness.

I have a list of long strings that includes URLs and other bits, e.g.

http://myurl.com/search/stringA?SomeMoreStuffA
http://myurlA.com/search/stringB?SomeMoreStuffB
http://myurlB.com/search/stringC?SomeMoreStuffX
http://myurlC.com/search/stringA?SomeMoreStuffXYZ
http://myurl.com/search/stringZ?SomeMoreStuffZZZ

[download]

I want to sort on just the strings between /search/ and the ? character, e.g.

$URL =~/search/(.+)\?
my($searchString) = $1;

[download]

(Note that rows 1 and 4 above will have identical $searchString values.)

But I also want to keep a reference to the full original URL string and anything else in the string.

I can obviously create an array with the $searchString values and sort that, but how do I map them to the original full string? I can't use a hash, since there are often duplicates (e.g. rows 1 and 4 above, both 'stringA').

Any thoughts? Thanks much as always.

Scott

In reply to Sorting on identical values by slugger415

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