Re: Printing a hash in a specific order?

[thpfft]

in reply to Printing a hash in a specific order?

If you just want the output to look tidy, or to be ordered in a predictable way, then a reasonably simple lexical sort will probably serve. That will get you as far as putting all the alias-* fields next to each other, but if your goal is to make the information human-friendly - ie ordered in an arbitrary way - then the answer will have to be a form of template.

You could consider a full templating system like the Template Toolkit - the initial investment of time would almost certainly pay off later - but for your present requirements all you need is a sort of master sequence that will serve as a guide:

key
type
flags
Alias-.*
Full Name
Post Office
Description
...
Building-.*
owner

Then you just step through the template dropping the right data into your output string in response to each line. Implementing the wildcards will be a bit tricky, but you could use something like the following wildly untested bit of pseudo-perl to obey regexes in the template:

    my $output;
    while (<template>) {
        chomp;
        for (grep { /$_/ } keys %{ $data{$key} }) {
            $output .= "$_: " .  $data{$key}{$_} . "\n";
        }
    }

which would of course be bristling with taint- and sanity-checks before it made it out into the world :)