Hi, I am new to perl and need help in sorting dates. I have a text file with 50000 lines. One column is date in the format D/M/YYYY. I'm reading the file and making a hash for the date count. I would like to sort these dates before displaying them finally. I tried converting this to DD/MM/YYYY using regular expression but this obviously dosent work. I guess converting the date to YYYY/MM/DD, sorting and converting back is not a good idea also. I havent worked with date modules and can someone suggest which one to use Date::Calc or Date::Manip and how to use them with hash in my case. Thanks in advance. Joseph 
foreach my $line (@file)
{
    my @fields = split(/,/, $line);
    if ($fields[6] !~ /\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{4}/)
    {
        @tempdate = split(/\//, $fields[6]);
        if ($tempdate[0] < 10)
        {
            $newdate = "0" . $tempdate[0] . "/";
        }
        else
        {
            $newdate = $tempdate[0] . "/";
        }
        if ($tempdate[1] < 10)
        {
            $newdate = $newdate . "0" . $tempdate[1] . "/";
        }
        else
        {
            $newdate = $newdate . $tempdate[1] . "/";
        }
        $fields[6] = $newdate . $tempdate[2];
    }
    $datecount{$fields[6]}++;
}
foreach my $date (sort(keys(%datecount)))
{
    print "\n", $date, ": ", $datecount{$date};
}

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In reply to Sorting Dates by josephjohn

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