I took your question to mean: "how can I apply Perl sort to this data structure?". This seems to sort your sample data correctly: sort { $a->{date} cmp $b->{date} } @{$data->{news}};Of course, this will do weird things if you have dates from different years since it sorts by month first (I presume those dates are mm-dd-yy). But it should point in the right direction if you want to use a better date comparison routine.

HTH