From: Mark Probert <probertm@..._acm.org>
Date: 2003-08-28T05:12:17+09:00
Subject: sorting on hash contents


Hi, all.

Say I have a hash of 4 elements, val[1..3] and name

  h["a"] = "1,2,3,fred"
  h["b"] = "4,1,2,jack"
  h["c"] = "3,3,4,jill"

How do I define:

  def sort_hash(field="val1")
    h.each { |key, data|
      (val1, val2, val3, name) = data.split(/,/)
    # etc..
  end

elegantly?

One possibility is to write it out to a tempfile and use
the external `sort` command.  Is there an easy pure-ruby
solution?

TIA,

-- 
-mark.