[ale] Re: sort using perl

[Greg Sabino Mullane]

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> Does anybody know a quick and dirty way to sort by the third letter...

Perl is particularly good at this sort of thing:

my @sorted = 
map  { $_->[0] }
sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] }
map  { [$_, lc substr($_,2)] } @list;

This is very quick as in "time to sort a large list."

If you want quick as in "quick to type" (but much slower to run):

for (sort { lc substr{$a,2} cmp lc substr($b,2)} @list) {
  print;
}

All of this depends on the nature and size of your data of course: 
for the above, I'm assuming that case does not matter, all sorting 
is alphabetic, and the characters after the third are also significant 
as far as the sorting goes.

Greg Sabino Mullane
greg at turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200112181033
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