I work with GMT time zone dates with the YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format often. String compare with this is fine. The key is that the leading zeroes are absolutely necessary. This is actually what a date looks like in an SQLite DB.
I see many fine posts with sorting techniques if @$data is large.
Not considered yet is what happens if more than one thing happened on the "most recent date"? In my data sets, measured to the second, I would allow for this possibility (and it very likely could indeed happen). Code below shows just one way.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
use Data::Dump qw(dump dd);
my $data = [
{
'Color' => 'green',
'Step' => 'Platform',
'acc' => '1111',
'Date' => '08-06-2022'
},
{
'Color' => 'black',
'Step' => 'Platform',
'acc' => '1111',
'Date' => '01-05-2019'
},
{
'Color' => 'reddish',
'Step' => 'Platform',
'acc' => '1111',
'Date' => '03-21-2021'
},
{
'Color' => 'blue',
'Step' => 'Platform',
'acc' => '1111',
'Date' => '10-11-2020'
},
{
'Color' => 'white',
'Step' => 'Platform',
'acc' => '1111',
'Date' => '08-06-2022'
},
{
'Color' => 'red',
'Step' => 'Platform',
'acc' => '1111',
'Date' => '03-21-2021'
},
];
@$data = sort{my $A = $a->{Date};
my $B = $b->{Date};
$A =~ s/(\d+)-(\d+)-(\d+)/$3-$1-$2/;
$B =~ s/(\d+)-(\d+)-(\d+)/$3-$1-$2/;
$B cmp $A}@$data;
my $most_recent_href = $data->[0];
dd $most_recent_href;
#see if there are others on same date as most recent??
foreach my $href (@$data[1..@$data-1])
{
if ($href->{Date} eq $most_recent_href->{Date})
{
dd $href;
}
else {last;}
}
__END__
{ acc => 1111, Color => "green", Date => "08-06-2022", Step => "Platfo
+rm" }
{ acc => 1111, Color => "white", Date => "08-06-2022", Step => "Platfo
+rm" }