Question

I’m looking for help sorting an array where each element is made up of “a number, then a string, then a number”. I would like to sort on the first number part of the array elements, descending (so that I list the higher numbers first), while also listing the text etc.

am still a beginner so alternatives to the below are also welcome

use strict;
use warnings;

my @arr = map {int( rand(49) + 1) } ( 1..100 ); # build an array of 100 random numbers between 1 and 49

my @count2;

foreach my $i (1..49) {

    my @count = join(',', @arr) =~ m/$i,/g; # maybe try to make a string only once then search trough it... ???
my $count1 = scalar(@count); # I want this $count1 to be the number of times each of the numbers($i) was found within the string/array.

    push(@count2, $count1 ." times for ". $i); # pushing a "number then text and a number / scalar, string, scalar" to an array.
}

#for (@count2) {print "$_\n";}
# try to add up all numbers in the first coloum to make sure they == 100

 #sort @count2 and print the top 7
@count2 = sort {$b <=> $a} @count2; # try to stop printout of this, or sort on =~ m/^anumber/ ??? or just on the first one or two \d

foreach my $i (0..6) {
 print $count2[$i] ."\n"; # seems to be sorted right anyway
}

Answer 1

First, store your data in an array, not in a string:

# inside the first loop, replace your line with the push() with this one:
push(@count2, [$count1, $i]; 

Then you can easily sort by the first element of each subarray:

my @sorted = sort { $b->[0] <=> $a->[0] } @count2;

And when you print it, construct the string:

printf "%d times for %d\n", $sorted[$i][0], $sorted[$i][1];

See also: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlreftut.html, perlfaq4