Sorting Deep Nested Arrays

[Brahmanathswami]

I followed Ender Nafi's lead on this. I agree.

"Often, the simplest methods are the most reliable one."



My head starts to spin with the arrays get too deep. It's so easy to 
load them up , but then getting it back out!

so Ender's idea was to "get out of the array"  good!

  I used tried and true verbose brick by brick expressions to get into a 
list instead of yet another array.

# For a listing we just need to get the data out into a simple line-tab 
delimited variable
         # to sort it properly the array keys are not sortable
         put tRow["start_time"] & tab into tTaskLine
         put tRow["task"] & tab after tTaskLine
         put tRow["budget"] & tab after tTaskLine
         put tRow["description"] & tab after tTaskLine
         put tRow["budget"] & tab after tTaskLine
         put tRow["amount"]   after tTaskLine
         # we are switching to line based delivery so we need to wipes 
CR's in the description now
         replace cr with " " in tTaskLine # one space
         put tTaskLine & cr after tLongReport
     end repeat
      set the itemdel to tab
      sort tLongReport descending by item 1 of each
      put tLongReport into gData["allTasksReport"]

then in my revIgniter output view I used this:

<?
          put empty into tBuf
          put gData["allTasksReport"] into tList
           repeat for each line tEntry in tList
              set the itemdel to tab
put "<tr><td class='border'>"& (item 1 of tEntry) &"</td><td 
class='border'>"& (item 2 of tEntry) &"</td><td class='border'>"&( item 
3 of  tEntry) &"</td><td class='description border'>" &  (item 4 of  
tEntry) &"</td><td class='border'>"& (item 5 of  tEntry) &"</td><td 
class='aRight border'>"& (item 6 of  tEntry) &"</td></tr>" after tBuf
           end repeat

           return tBuf
           ?>

OK, so  maybe a few more lines of code and not as "cool" as arrays, but 
it's transparent and de-buggable.

And for just a few fields, very small amount or data... where the 
content is short text strings and numbers, it hardly more code doing 
operations on tab del lines vs doing repeat loops on array keys and then 
sorting the keys and output the array on another loop iteration over 
sorted keys:  you end up with almost as much code and it's very dense  
OTOH just the gData array in RevIgniter is really fun.

Swasti Astu, Be Well!
Brahmanathaswami

Kauai's Hindu Monastery
www.HimalayanAcademy.com



Robert Sneidar wrote:
> Often, the simplest methods are the most reliable ones.
> >  How about combining the array into a temporary variable,
> >  then sort it by the*item*  (formerly*key*) you want,
> >  then construct the tBuf?