This is separate enough from my previous reply that I thought I'd reply again. Hopefully I don't get too annoying. ;-)

The code above gives me my desired result with my existing data set. In case that changes in the future, I'm trying to figure out how to split "Fa10/0/1" into [Fa, 10, 0, 1] but all my ideas involve substrings & splits & freaky array manipulations and quickly get very ugly. Ideas?
    @a = $a =~ /( [[:alpha:]]+ | [[:digit:]]+ )/gx;
    @b = $b =~ /( [[:alpha:]]+ | [[:digit:]]+ )/gx;

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In reply to Re: best practices for a complex sort + splitting an alphanumeric string by revdiablo
in thread best practices for a complex sort + splitting an alphanumeric string by gabrielle

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