Re: hash of hashes sort second level keys

[aeaton1843]

Thanks for all of the replies. I thought the answer may be along the lines of what all of you are saying. My actual problem is quite a bit more complex than this but the answers to this simple question tells me there is no easy way to accomplish what I am trying to do. I actually have a hohref, hr, that is 5 layers deep. I am trying to sort the entire hr on the keys of layer 4 first and layer 3 second. Since the hr is linear, I am stepping through the entire hash recording each set of keys in an array. I then bubble sort the keys keeping track of each relationship and Voila I have the output for which I was looking. Is there a better way to do this?

[kennethk]

While it does increase your complexity, I fail to see why hash flattening or restructuring will not accomplish your goal - the solutions presented here are certainly applicable to your scenario:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my %sorthash = ();

$sorthash{'10'}{'20'}{1}{2}{3}= '1';
$sorthash{'40'}{'50'}{1}{4}{3}= '4';
$sorthash{'20'}{'30'}{3}{4}{3}= '2';

# Flatten
my @flat_array = ();
for my $key1 (keys %sorthash) {
    for my $key2 (keys %{$sorthash{$key1}} ) {
        for my $key3 (keys %{$sorthash{$key1}{$key2}} ) {
            for my $key4 (keys %{$sorthash{$key1}{$key2}{$key3}} ) {
                for my $key5 (keys %{$sorthash{$key1}{$key2}{$key3}{$k
+ey4}} ) {
                    push @flat_array, [$key1, $key2, $key3, $key4, $ke
+y5, $sorthash{$key1}{$key2}{$key3}{$key4}{$key5}];
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

# Sort flat array
for my $entry (sort { $a->[3] <=> $b->[3] or $a->[2] <=> $b->[2] } @fl
+at_array)
 {
    print join ", ", @$entry;
    print "\n";
}

If that's getting a little deep in terms of nested loops, you can write a recursive crawler to flatten the list:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my %sorthash = ();

$sorthash{'10'}{'20'}{1}{2}{3}= '1';
$sorthash{'40'}{'50'}{1}{4}{3}= '4';
$sorthash{'20'}{'30'}{3}{4}{3}= '2';

# Flatten
my @flat_array = hash_crawler(\%sorthash);

# Sort flat array
for my $entry (sort { $a->[3] <=> $b->[3] or $a->[2] <=> $b->[2] } @fl
+at_array)
 {
    print join ", ", @$entry;
    print "\n";
}

sub hash_crawler {
    my ($value, @prefix_array) = @_;
    my @results = ();
    if (ref $value) {
        for (keys %$value) {
            push @results, hash_crawler($value->{$_},@prefix_array,$_)
+;
        }
    } else {
        push @results, [@prefix_array, $value];
    }
    return @results;
}

Update: Fixed bug as per rubasov's post below.

[rubasov]

It's not totally clear for me what does it mean "trying to sort the entire hr on the keys of layer 4 first and layer 3 second", but if it means to sort by the 4th column as the key and 3rd column as a subkey, then probably you wanted to write this to sort the flattened array:

sort { $a->[3] <=> $b->[3] or $a->[2] <=> $b->[2] } @flat_array

[aeaton1843]

"if it means to sort by the 4th column as the key and 3rd column as a subkey" is exactly what I was doing. That is very nice! This is exactly what I was looking for, great answer. I will rewrite some code and see how it goes. Thanks again for the replies!