From: Christopher Dicely <cmdicely@...>
Date: 2008-03-29T15:29:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Help on best way to gather/sort results ?

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 10:49 PM, Tony De <tonydema@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Tony De wrote:
>  > Todd Benson wrote:
>  >> On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 12:02 AM, Tony De <tonydema@gmail.com> wrote:
>  >>>  have for qmail.  So, I've got a working prototype.  If you could help me
>  >>>  on my sort and if you have any other comments/suggestions to throw my
>  >>>  way I'm sure I could learn a thing or two.  Being new to ruby, there's a
>  >>>  lot of new ideas here.  Thank guys.
>  >>>
>  >>
>  >> Being a little lazy at the moment to go through the code, have you
>  >> looked at #sort_by{}?
>  >>
>  >> Todd
>  >
>  > I believe I ran across it but I recall it blew up when I worked with it.
>  > Likely an issue with my as the unskilled ruby coder than the method
>  > itself.  I'll take another look.  Thanks
>  >
>  > tonyd
>
>  Ok, tried this @results.sort_by { |a| a[1] } - thinking that I want to
>  sort on the second element in my array "Source".  No sort was performed
>  at all.  Scratching my head..

Did you capture the result? #sort and #sort_by are non-destructive, so this:

---
a= [ [0,3], [4,1], [5,2]]
a.sort_by {|i| i[1]}
puts a.inspect
---
gives: "[[0,3],[4,1],[5,2]]"

but this:
---
a= [ [0,3], [4,1], [5,2]]
b=a.sort_by {|i| i[1]}
puts b.inspect
---
gives: "[[4,1],[5,2],[0,3]]"

There is a destructive version of #sort (#sort!), but not of #sort_by.