in reply to sorting dates in YYYYMMDD format

On of the great things about YYYYMMDD is that if you sort it numerically you get it properly sorted. So just do 

@ordered = sort { $a <=> $b } @dates;

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Comment: your expected output is as wrong as your output you get, they are identical... And in your code, $d is never defined. And the example is badly chosen as all parts are identical apart from the month. In this case, it does not matter, whether year is at the beginning or at the end.

UPDATE: Even if you sort string-wise you are fine, so sort @dates does the job.

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Re^2: sorting dates in YYYYMMDD format
by salva (Canon) on Jul 04, 2013 at 07:11 UTC
    One of the great things about YYYYMMDD is that if you sort it lexicographically you get it properly sorted! 
    @ordered = sort @dates;

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[d/l]
      One of the great things about YYYYMMDD is that if you sort it lexicographically you get it properly sorted!

      Yes! This is what bugs me about all the international date "standards" -- none of them sort naturally. The only tweak I use is for human readability, YYYYMMmmmDD, where mmm is the 3 letter abbreviation (in the language of choice), which helps the mildly dyslexic distinguish 5 March and 3 May (though maybe that's the hardest one).

      -QM
      --
      Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

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        Hos does a date in ISO 8601 format -- YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss (and variations) -- does not sort correctly? Or, by "international date "standards"" did you mean something else?
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