I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve, but if the following (leaving out the HTML stuff for the moment) does what you want let us know:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @lines;

while (<DATA>) {
  my ($first, $sort, $second, $tail) = m/^(\w+)\s+(\d+)\s+(\w+)(.*)$/;
  die "Unable to match any lines:$!\n" if ! defined $tail;
  push @lines, [$sort, $first, $second, $tail];
}

print join "\n", map {"$_->[1] $_->[0] $_->[2]$_->[3]"} sort {$a->[0] 
+<=> $b->[0]} @lines;

__DATA__
a 0 f g j k
b 4 y h t e e e
c 1 n s v c x
d 3 f f f
[download]

Prints:

a 0 f g j k
c 1 n s v c x
d 3 f f f
b 4 y h t e e e
[download]