Re: Sorting Dates

If you want to go with your original approach, the following maybe useful:

my @dates = qw(5/7/2001 3/10/2005 1/1/1996 2/1/1993);

foreach my $date (@dates) {
  if ($date =~ m|(\d{1,2})/(\d{1,2})/(\d{4})|) {
    my $new_date = sprintf("%d/%02d/%02d", $3, $2, $1);
    ...
  }
}
[download]

Hope this helps, -gjb-

Comment on Re: Sorting Dates Download Code

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Re^2: Sorting Dates by josephjohn (Acolyte) on Nov 24, 2005 at 10:51 UTC
Thanks for the suggestion gjb. Does that sort the hash too. I need to sort the dates, find the last date, and perform some calculations later in the script. Also please let me know what qw() is used for.	[reply]
Re^3: Sorting Dates by gjb (Vicar) on Nov 24, 2005 at 11:11 UTC
This doesn't sort the hash, it only converts the date from D/M/YYYY to YYYY/MM/DD so that it can be used as a key in your `%datecount` hash. This hash can be sorted the way you do it in your code fragment. As to `qw`: `$ perldoc -f qw qw/STRING/ Generalized quotes. See "Regexp Quote-Like Operators" in perlop.` [download] It returns a list of words without doing interpolation on them. It is just a convenient way of writing: `my @dates = ('5/7/2001' '3/10/2005' '1/1/1996' '2/1/1993');` [download] Hope this helps, -gjb-	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Sorting Dates by secret (Beadle) on Nov 24, 2005 at 11:17 UTC
>Does that sort the hash too You cannot sort a hash : a hash is by construction with no particular order. What you can do is sort the keys of a hash and print the corresponding values. When you do `foreach (keys %hash)` you get the keys in an order that is undefined although always the same. But it will change if you add or remove keys, therefore if you need a specific order you should do `foreach ( sort { my sort function} keys %hash )`	[reply] [d/l] [select]


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