[sf-perl] Happy fun sorting problem

Josh Berkus josh at agliodbs.com
Fri Jun 10 09:36:51 PDT 2005


Folks,

I can think of a few ways to solve this issue, but none that are elegant.  I'm 
looking for elegant.

I have a 3-level heirarchy:

Category
	Sub Category
		Item = Value

I want to print output that formats like:

Category-1
	Sub Category-H
		Item_a = Value
		Item_f = Value
	Sub Category-S
		Item_d = Value
Category-2
	Sub Category-B
		Item_k = Value
...etc...

The idea being to group by sorted category, then by sorted subcategory, then 
sort the items on their keys within that.  The Items happen to be unique, but 
I'm not sure that makes a difference to the problem.  To further complicate 
things, the "Category" level is being sorted according to an external 
ordering list and not alphabetically.

Inside a database, I would just query and sort.   But this is completely in 
perl.   What's the standard way of dealing with this?  Hashes of hashes?

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco


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