Probably you have "use warnings" turned on. You can disable the warning for
numeric comparison with "no warnings 'numeric';"
perl -E 'use warnings; no warnings "numeric"; my @a =
("12\thi","37\tb","123\tc","187\ta"); my @b = sort { $a <=> $b } @a; say
join("\n",@b)'
12 hi
37 b
123 c
187 a
You can scope this if you like:
my @result;
{
no warnings 'numeric';
@result = sort { $a <=> $b } @source;
}
You could also force the string to a number using a thing from Scalar::Util.
References:
http://perlmaven.com/argument-isnt-numeric-in-numeric
http://perlmaven.com/automatic-value-conversion-or-casting-in-perl
--Brock
On Tue, Mar 8, 2016 at 4:29 PM, Kenneth Wolcott <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Hi;
>
> How do I call the built-in Perl sort function on an array of strings
> where the string is composed of one or more digits, followed by a tab
> which is followed by a string and I want the results to be sorted in
> reverse numeric order?
>
> I looked at http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/sort.html and I still
> don't know the right answer to this question. I suppose if I disable
> warnings, then it works ok?
>
> The GNU sort (Cygwin/Linux) function does not complain about numbers
> followed by strings for the data when requested with reverse sort and
> just does it.
>
> The "$b <=> $a" option to sort seems to complain about the strings
> in the data, but the output is correct.
>
> Thanks,
> Ken Wolcott
>
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