sorting function arcument to 'sort': Can I pass additional parameters?

[mpettis]

Update: -- Thank you all very much... I am going to hack in Anonymous Monk's solution, and investigate the other two to see if they will work, as, per blazar, I really DON'T want to pass parameters to sort.

Thanks,

=========================================

Hi,

I want to build a sorting sub within a 'for' loop that is different based on a value within the scope of the 'for' loop. Can this be done? The variables I use in the sub do not seem to be visible within the customized sorting sub. I know that $a and $b are passed automatically to this function -- is there a way to pass in other arguments to the sorting sub other than $a and $b?

Thanks,

Matt

[Anonymous Monk]

@list = sort { blah('whatever') } @list;

sub blah {
  my $w = shift;
  return $a <=> $b;
}

[f00li5h]

If you are sorting by many fields Sort::Maker may be of some help too

[blazar]

I personally believe that you don't want to "pass in other arguments to the sorting sub" because the sub is meant to be used sort and sort() itself won't pass anything in. Chances are you want to use closures instead:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

my @trans = ( sub { shift }, sub { ~ shift } );
my @unsorted = qw/foo bar baz/;

for my $tr (@trans) {
    my @sorted = sort { $tr->($a) cmp $tr->($b) } @unsorted;
    say "@sorted";
}

__END__