From: Wai-Sun Chia <waisun.chia@...>
Date: 2002-10-30T16:27:54+09:00
Subject: Sorting HUGE hashes

I have a couple of HUGE hashes (~20,000 pairs and growing) that I need 
to sort. These are in the form of:

{
	"foo"=>["fee","fi"],
	"bar"=>["fee","fi","fo"],
	"baz"=>["fee","fi","fo","fum"],
	:
	:
}

I want to be able to sort them in the order of the array size (each of 
the element has a special variable-sized array. So that I can dump them 
in another array and indexed in ascending order.

sorted_stuff[0] = ["foo", ["fee","fi"]]			#array size = 2
sorted_stuff[1] = ["bar", ["fee","fi","fo"]]		#array size = 3
sorted_stuff[1] = ["bar", ["fee","fi","fo","fum"]]	#array size = 4

What is the scalable way to do this? I'm looking at scaling these hashes 
beyond 50K...


-- 
Wai-Sun "Squidster" Chia
Consulting & Integration
Linux/Unix/Web Developer Dude