sort array table

[welle]

Dear monks

I have a small set of records (like a table) stored in an array. I need to sort the array alphabetiacally according to the values in one particolar row. The array structure *should* be something like this

sentence1 attribute1 value1
sentence2 attribute2 value2
sentence3 attribute3 value3

What is wrong with this?

foreach my $sentence(@sentences){
#$attribute and $values come from other subrutines
push(@array, ($sentence, $attribute, $value)); 
}

my $selected_order=1;#order according to $attribute
sort { $a->[$selected_order] cmp $b->[$selected_order] } @array;
print @array;

I think, I'm confusing something with the array...

UPDATE: the problem is of course the array. Looking at it's content with use Data::Dumper; it clearly shows that the intended table structure is not mantained...

[poj]

You need to push array refs to @array to build a 2-dimensional array, retain the results of the sort and dereference to get the values.

#!perl

use strict;
my @array=();
while (<DATA>){
  chomp;
  my ($sentence, $attribute, $value) = split;
  # use [] not () to push array refs
  push @array,[$sentence,$attribute,$value];
}

my $selected_order=1; #order according to $attribute
# retain the result of sort in new array 
my @sorted_array = sort { $a->[$selected_order] cmp $b->[$selected_ord
+er] } @array;
# or use existing
# @array = sort { $a->[$selected_order] cmp $b->[$selected_order] } @a
+rray;

# get values from sorted array 
# by dereferencing
for my $record (@sorted_array){
  print "@$record\n"
};

__DATA__
sentence1 attribute3 value2
sentence2 attribute2 value1
sentence3 attribute1 value3

poj

[welle]

It works perfectly. Thank you for the line by line explaination!