I have spent an afternooon trying to work this one out and it has me stumped, if anyone can surggest a resource which can do this I will be enturnally grateful.

My problem is I have a data structure as follows 

@job_data = ({'name'='job1', 'runs'='19:20'},
                 {'name'='job2', 'runs'='17:22'},
                 {'name'='job3', 'runs'='19:25'})

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The hashes come from a number of XML files and there are about 70 hahses in the array.
What I need to do is sort the hashes in to time order on the string representation of time in the 'runs' value.
Can anyone offer help. Thanks in advance.

Update
With the advice from dws I used this sub to deal with my problem, I'm sure someone will come up with a simple one liner that does the same, but I'm just a hopeless sinner. 

sub by_time{

    my $a_time = $a->{'starts'};
    my $b_time = $b->{'starts'};
    
    my @aparts = split ':', $a_time;
    my @bparts = split ':', $b_time;
    #print $aparts[0]."\t".$bparts[0]."\n";
    
    if ($aparts[0] > $bparts[0]){return 1}
    
    if ($aparts[0] < $bparts[0]){return 0}
    
    else {
       if ($aparts[1] > $bparts[1]){return 1}
       if ($aparts[1] < $bparts[1]){return 0}
       else{return 1}
       };
    
}

[download]

In reply to Sorting an array of hashes by Scarborough

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