We needed to address nesting of string values as well as regular ordering
I don't understand what you mean by this. It looks like you're just sorting on the length of the string. Replacing your big for loop with the following line produces the same output. 
@v = sort {length($a) <=> length($b)} @v;

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In reply to Re: Funky sorting by blakem
in thread Funky sorting by Anonymous Monk

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