It's hard to properly understand on what criteria you want to sort based on your description. As you want to order by the value of the 'name' field (which is non-numerical), you should use the cmp operator instead of <=> in your sort.

Now, if what you want to do is order by a non-numerical field, and then in case of equality fall back to comparing numerical fields (like the 'age' field for example), the usual way is to declare a little sub you'll use with the sort function.

for my $id (sort by_name_and_age keys %hash) {
    print "$hash{$id}{'item'} - $hash{$id}{'name'}\n";
}

sub by_name_and_age {
    # Sort by reversed ASCII order...
    $hash{$b}{'name'} cmp $hash{$a}{'name'}
    or
    # ... or by ascending age value.
    $hash{$a}{'age'} <=> $hash{$b}{'age'};
}

[download]

As always, it's a good idea to read (again) the documentation of sort.

In reply to Re: numerical and non numerical sorts by Fang
in thread numerical and non numerical sorts by rsiedl

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