A decorated solution. Assumes none of the strings in the sub-arrays contain nulls, hence you may not consider this approach 'general'! Should be default-sort fast.
c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -MData::Dump -le
"my @list = (
['blah', 'asdf', 'foo', 'bar'],
['two'],
['zzz', 'def', 'ghi'],
['one'],
['mmm', 'def', 'ghi'],
['qqq', 'xyz', 'aaa'],
);
;;
my @sorted =
map undecorate(\@list, $_),
sort
map decorate(\@list, $_),
0 .. $#list
;
dd \@sorted;
;;
sub decorate {
my ($ar_list, $i) = @_;
;;
my $elems = @{ $ar_list->[$i] };
my @smeti = reverse @{ $ar_list->[$i] };
;;
return pack qq{N (Z*)$elems N}, $elems, @smeti, $i
}
;;
sub undecorate {
my ($ar_list, $decoration) = @_;
;;
return $ar_list->[ unpack 'x* X[N] N', $decoration ];
}
"
[
["one"],
["two"],
["qqq", "xyz", "aaa"],
["mmm", "def", "ghi"],
["zzz", "def", "ghi"],
["blah", "asdf", "foo", "bar"],
]