Thanks, I figured it out and it was a rather dumb problem not even Perl related. I updated my original post to explain. I appreciate you taking the time to try and help me out, it was actually when I was trying to test your sample code that I randomly stumbled on to my answer. I opened up my little test file to change the tabs to tildes and saw the mysterious double quotes that had been previously missing when viewed in Excel.

In reply to Re^2: Sorting an array of strings when some of the strings have commas in them? by perldigious
in thread Sorting an array of strings when some of the strings have commas in them? by perldigious

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