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Another way to do it, while certainly not the most efficient, is to replace undefelements with a value guaranteed to both be the maximum value in the comparison and uniquely distinct from the original value set.

I show this inefficient technique more to sow seeds for inspiration for future problems you may run into where setting a maximum value might be a useful idea. Data transmogrification still has value in some cases; having that tool in your toolshed is useful.

Coupled with the approach used by LanX, you could probably craft a fairly efficient and reliable version of this approach.

In this example, I convert the original array such that undefelements are replaced with a unique identifier guaranteed to sort to the bottom of the list (based on the assumption this is a string comparison); the replacement string is guaranteed to not have been found in the original array (again, via an inefficient technique -- I force it to be longer than the longest element in the original array).

From there, the rest of the operation should be relatively intuitive.

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; # Constants (Operationally, if not functionally) my $MAXCHR = chr 255; my $HORRUL = '-------------------------------------------------------- +-----------------------'; # Globals my $Maxval = ''; my @Unsorted = ( 'Dog', 'Cat', 'Bird', undef, 'Elephant', undef, 'Liza +rd' ); dumpArray("Original:", @Unsorted); # Build a maximum-value scalar: Length = longest + 1 # We will temporarily replace all undefined elements with this value # Since it is composed of all chr 255 values, it is the highest for so +rt # Since it is one character longer than the longest element, it unique +ly # identifies the element as a former undef # Then sort can do its thing and we can detect these to convert back t +o undef my $maxlen = longestElement(@Unsorted); while (length($Maxval) <= $maxlen) { $Maxval .= $MAXCHR; } # Build a working copy of the array with undef replaced by $Maxval my @unsortedWork = (); foreach (@Unsorted) { if (defined $_) { push @unsortedWork, $_; } else { push @unsortedWork, $Maxval; } } # Sort, Convert modified entries back to undef, and show results my @sorted_custom = sort @unsortedWork; my @sorted_final = (); foreach (@sorted_custom) { if ($_ eq $Maxval) { push @sorted_final, undef; } else { push @sorted_final, $_; } } dumpArray("Custom Sort:", @sorted_final); exit; # Display an array with a title sub dumpArray { my ($dumpTitle, @dumpValues) = @_; print "$HORRUL\n$dumpTitle\n$HORRUL\n"; foreach my $dumpValue (@dumpValues) { if (defined $dumpValue) { print "$dumpValue\n"; } else { print "(undef)\n"; } } print "$HORRUL\n"; } sub longestElement { my $maxlen = 0; foreach(@_) { if (defined $_) { if (length > $maxlen) { $maxlen = length; } } } return $maxlen; }

Results:

S:\Steve\Dev\PerlMonks\P-2017-06-12@0734-sort-undef>sort1.pl ---------------------------------------------------------------------- +--------- Original: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- +--------- Dog Cat Bird (undef) Elephant (undef) Lizard ---------------------------------------------------------------------- +--------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- +--------- Custom Sort: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- +--------- Bird Cat Dog Elephant Lizard (undef) (undef) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- +--------- S:\Steve\Dev\PerlMonks\P-2017-06-12@0734-sort-undef>


In reply to Re: Sort undef by marinersk
in thread Sort undef by Anonymous Monk

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