First, you need an "else { () }" so that you return an empty list when you don't match (right now you are returning a scalar false value instead, which is roughly an empty string). And $a being "" means that $a->[0] is accessing the array that has an empty name (which means either you aren't useing strict or you have no unmatching lines).

If that change alone doesn't speed things up enough, then you can certainly do sorting faster than a Schwartzian Transform (creating all of those tiny anonymous arrays does require a bit of time and memory), though the ST is less prone to some common coding errors. 

my @sorton;
my @lines= grep {
    if(  m/^(.+?)\((\d+)\)\s-\s\[(.+?)\].+?"(.*?)"\.$/  ) {
        push @sorton, $1.pack("N",$2).$3;
        1;
    }
} <DATA>;
my @idx= sort { $sorton[$a] cmp $sorton[$b] } 0..$#sorton;
foreach(  @lines[@idx]  ) {
    print $_;
}

[download]

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re: Complex Sorting Optimization? by tye
in thread Complex Sorting Optimization? by orbital

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.