A recent question of mine asked how to sort data, which was <alpha character><numeric characters> for example <Ab1234>.
Several Monks kindly gave suggestions and the ‘heart’ of one of them was
%out = ();
for (@in){ 
    if (/^([A-Za-z_]+)(\d+)$/){
        # build hash of arrays
        # with alpha part uppercase:original as key
        push @{$out{join ':',uc $1,$1}},$2;
    } else {
        warn "\nInput data error <$_>\n";
    }
}

[download]

This gave exactly what I wanted.

As so often is the case the problem has become more complicated since I find that:

1. There can be a number or numbers in the middle as well at the end;
2. There can be some numeric values only.

Numbers in the middle case

A typical set of values when numbers are in the middle are

blank_5_str_1
blank_5_str_10
blank_5_str_11
blank_5_str_12
blank_5_str_13
blank_5_str_14
blank_5_str_2
blank_5_str_3
blank_5_str_4
blank_5_str_5
blank_5_str_6
blank_5_str_7
blank_5_str_8
blank_5_str_9

[download]

Note - the numbers may not be 'surrounded' by '_' characters.

For this data I would like the ‘text’ part data to be considered as blank_5_str_ and the number part of the data to be the number after the last _.

Therefore the first 3 items of the sorted list will be:

blank_5_str_1
blank_5_str_2
blank_5_str_3

[download]

Can the sort be changed to allow for this case?

Numbers only

One solution for this is to: 1. Split the data into 2 lists – one for text/number data and one for just numbers 2. Sort both lists independantly
3. Join the list so that the numbers are at the start or end

Is there a better solution than this?

In reply to Sorting text-number values by merrymonk

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