Nothing is jumping out at me from CPAN, except maybe Tie::RangeHash, which you might find a way to use with what you're doing. If not, here's a solution (not particularly efficient though):

sub get_fuzzy {
    my ($k, $h) = @_;
    return $h->{$k} if exists $h->{$k};

    for (sort keys %$h) {
        return $h->{$_} if $_ gt $k;  # if keys are numeric, change "g
+t" to ">"
    }

    return undef;    # if key is higher than the highest
}

my %hash = (a=>1, c=>3, e=>5, g=>7, i=>9);
print "|", join('|', map { get_fuzzy($_, \%h) } a..j), "|\n";

[download]

It's inefficient because it sorts all the hash keys each time there is a lookup and does a linear search through them. Also, I'm not sure what you want to do when looking up a value larger than the largest hash key. In this case, my code returns undef.

If you want efficiency, you may want to tie a class of your own that maintains the keys in sorted order, perhaps even indexed so you could do a binary search instead of a linear one.

-- Mike

--
XML::Simpler does not require XML::Parser or a SAX parser. It does require File::Slurp.
-- grantm, perldoc XML::Simpler

In reply to Re: retrieve next avaiable element in sorted hash by thelenm
in thread retrieve next avaiable element in sorted hash by vinforget

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