Sort Perl hash from largest to smallest

searayman picture searayman · Apr 18, 2012 · Viewed 18k times · Source

I am looking at an example found here: http://perlmeme.org/tutorials/sort_function.html

And it gives this code to sort a hash based on each key's value:

# Using <=> instead of cmp because of the numbers
    foreach my $fruit (sort {$data{$a} <=> $data{$b}} keys %data) {
        print $fruit . ": " . $data{$fruit} . "\n";
    }

This code I do not fully understand, but when I experiment with it, it sorts from lowest to highest. How can I flip it to sort from highest to lowest?

Answer

Ωmega picture Ωmega · Apr 18, 2012

Just use reverse sort instead of sort.

foreach my $fruit (reverse sort keys %data) { ...