asked on

Sorting form pairs in perl

I am parsing form pairs from a web form, but can not figure out how to then sort them alphabetically. Here is the code I am using below.

I have tried @form = sort @form;
but that doesn't seem to work.

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sub form_parse {
      read (STDIN, $buffer, $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'});
      @pairs = split(/&/, $buffer);

      foreach $pair (@pairs)
      {
      ($name, $value) = split(/=/, $pair);
      $value =~ tr/+/ /;
      $value =~ s/%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])/pack("C", hex($1))/eg;
      $form{$name} = $value;
      }}

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Adam314

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SOLUTION

Tintin

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webcs

ASKER

Adam I inserted

@keys = sort keys %form;

at the end and it didn't change the order at all.

ozo

It doesn't change %form, but it changes @keys
What are you doing with @keys and %form that did not change?

ozo

see
perldoc -q "sort a hash"
ans perhaps
perldoc Tie::IxHash

webcs

ASKER

Ok your replies led me in the right direction, as I just looked up HASH sort and got lots of info on google.

Ended up using this:

foreach $key (sort keys %form) {
# Print the name and value pairs in FORM array to MAIL.
print MAIL "$key: $form{$key}";
}

Thanks for the help. For everyone reference that sorts alphabetically upwards on the key. thanks