Re^2: Sorting based on any column

[Laurent_R]

Yes, it seems important, if I understand correctly this OP' quote: "my array is having both characters and numercis".

I can see two ways to go about it. Presumably, when using this function, the user knows what there will be in the column, so that the type of comparison could a parameter passed to the function. Assuming this is Boolean parameter stored in the $numeric variable, it could lead to something like this (untested):

    @sorted_array=  map { $_->[0] } 
                    sort { $numeric ? $b->[1] <=> $a->[1] : $b->[1] cm
+p $a->[1]} 
                    map { [ $_, (split " ", $_)[$col_2sort] } @unsorte
+d_array;

The other way might possibly look simpler (but is probably less clean and more error-prone):

    @sorted_array=  map { $_->[0] } 
                    sort { $b->[1] <=> $a->[1] ||  $b->[1] cmp $a->[1]
+} 
                    map { [ $_, (split " ", $_)[$col_2sort] } @unsorte
+d_array;

This is based on the idea that comparing two strings with <=> will yield 0, a false result, so that, if we have strings, the cmp comparison will be executed and return the correct comparison. But there are at least two downsides with this approach:

1. You need to silence out the Argument "foo" isn't numeric in numeric comparison (<=>) at ... warning with the appropriate pragma, and I usually hesitate quite a bit before deciding to silence out any warning (except perhaps, but only very very rarely, the initialized and the deep recursion warnings when I really know for sure it is OK);

2. There are several edge cases where it might break, especially if you have one numeric argument and one non-numeric argument:

$ perl -e 'print 3 <=> "b"'
1
 ~
$ perl -e 'print 3 cmp "b"'
-1

So this could work out for a one-off sort if you know your data very well, but this is really not very robust production code.

Update: Corrected two stupid typos in my code, thanks to AnomalousMonk for proofreading.