Re: Re: substr sort ??

[dbwiz]

You could simply use @values = sort @values, since this checks the first two digits

They are not exactly the same thing.

Your method will only work if every element had the same number of digits. If you were to compare "1abc" and "10abc", it would give you the wrong order.

perl -e '@array=(qw(1abc 10abc));@sorted=sort @array; print "@sorted\n
+";'

10abc 1abc


perl -e '@array=(qw(1abc 10abc)); @sorted = sort {$a<=>$b}  @array;
print "@sorted\n";'

1abc 10abc

[CombatSquirrel]

I know, but the example had zero-padded fixed-width integer identifiers, which suggested that the numbers were always fixed width. I thought about a Schwartzian transform at first (like flounder99 did in Re: substr sort ??), but decided it was overkill and due to the multiple mappings slower than the direct comparison approach. If the identifiers were integers with different numbers of digits, though, my code wouldn't work, as you pointed out.