Perl Alphabetical sort

ReggieRWalker

ENV: TS 6.7.1 SP1

I am pulling my hair out over this script now!

I have a simple inline callout that takes a text file as input and displays it's contents in a drop down menu. I want to take the contents and sort them alphabetically and haven't been successful. I've used:

if ( open (INF, "<$listfile") ) {
my @lines = <INF>;
sort @lines;

and

if ( open (INF, "<$listfile") ) {
my @lines = <INF>;
@lines = sort { lc($a) cmp lc($b) } @lines;   # alphabetical sort 

The behavior is a list that starts with terms beginning in 'M', although I have many that should be listed before that. For some reason, I thought the default behavior of the sort function was to sort them alphabetically, but I guess I'm missing something.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

TIA

jbonifaci

Your first example won't work, because sort doesn't change the contents of the array you're sorting, it returns a sorted array.

So you would need:

@lines = sort @lines;

Other than that, both of your sort examples should work, the first being case sensitive, the second being case insensitive.

There must be something else amiss here. What are the contents of your list file? What is being outputted? Are you modifying $/ anywhere? Your file might not be reading in properly. All of your lines may be being read into a single element of the array, which your sort obviously won't affect. What is the value of $#lines after you read in the file? Is it what you expected?

~Jeff