How about converting those strings into ones in which leading zeroes are included, sort the strings, and then convert the strings back to the numerals as shown?

The following code is painful to see for Perl programmers. Forgive me. I don't yet speak Perlish very well.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
use diagnostics;
use strict;
use warnings;
my @data= ( "1.1.2.3", "1.10.2.3", "1.10.2.3.1", "1.1.1.1.1.1.1", "1.1
+2", "1.0");
my $strg;
my @hold=();
my $element;

foreach  $element (@data)    {
    @hold=split(/\./,$element);
$strg="";
        foreach my $item (@hold)    {
            $strg.=sprintf("%03d.", $item);
            }
        $strg=substr($strg, 0, (length($strg)-1));
    $element=$strg;
    }
print "Unsorted:\n";
foreach $element (@data)    {
    print "$element\n";
    }
@ data = sort {$a cmp $b} @data;
print "\n\nSorted\n";
foreach $element (@data)    {
    print "$element\n";
    }

[download]

The output is:

Unsorted:
001.001.002.003
001.010.002.003
001.010.002.003.001
001.001.001.001.001.001.001
001.012
001.000


Sorted
001.000
001.001.001.001.001.001.001
001.001.002.003
001.010.002.003
001.010.002.003.001
001.012

[download]

A similar use of sprintf could be used to convert the numbers with leading zeroes back to ones that do not have leading zeroes. I leave this as an exercise for the reader, and to spare you gentle folks any more of my ugly code.

In reply to Re: Sorting Outline Numbers by spiritway
in thread Sorting Outline Numbers by Anonymous Monk

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