This blog post is about the sort function in Perl. Mostly it is from the book “perl for dummies”, since I am reading it now.

This is a good book, since it explains many concepts very clearly.

The “sort” function sorts a list alphabeticlly. Perl also allows us to sort a list according to the rule we defined.

if alphabetically, we can write the code as the following:

1
2

@strs = ('cognition', 'attune', 'bell');
print join(' ', sort @strs);

It will give the following result:

1

attune bell cognition

Here below I will show what we can do if we want to sort based on the way we want it to be:

1
2

@strs = ('cognition', 'attune', 'bell');
print join(' ', sort{length($a) <=> length($b)} @strs);

The above code will sort the list according to the length of the string in the list.

What if the our so-called rule is a subroutine?

1
2
3
4
5

sub lensort { length($a) <=> length($b) };

@strs = ('cognition', 'attune', 'bell');
print join(' ', sort lensort @strs);

This post is going to be continued. I will add more things as I come accross more useful and interesing examples regarding the sort function.