I agree with you cog regarding the the ST over the OM but that's probably because I've never used the OM in anger so I'm not familiar with it. I think that both JediWizard's solution and yours overcomplicate the transformation of the date into a sortable form. Just reversing the date to sort it and then reversing it again to extract it seems much simpler and quicker to me. I have done some benchmarking which seems to bear this out. I've also corrected a couple of typos (you had missed a closing quote in one of your hash keys but I've unquoted them all and JediWizard had doubled his quote words like qw(qw( ... )). Here is the code

use strict;
use warnings;

use Benchmark qw(cmpthese);

# Generate a thousand dates at random.
#
my @startDates;
push @startDates,
   sprintf(q{%02d}, int((rand 28) + 1))
   . q{-}
   . sprintf(q{%02d}, int((rand 12) + 1))
   . q{-}
   . int((rand 25) + 2000)
   for (1 .. 1000);

# cog's method.
#
my $rcCog = sub
{
    my @sortedDates =
       map  { $_->{date} }
       sort
       {
          $a->{year}  <=> $b->{year}  or
          $a->{month} <=> $b->{month} or
          $a->{day}   <=> $b->{day}
       }
       map
       {
          /(\d\d)-(\d\d)-(\d\d\d\d)/;
          {
             date  => $_,
             day   => $1,
             month => $2,
             year  => $3
          }
       }
       @startDates;
    return $sortedDates[0];
};

# JediWizard's method.
#
my $rcJediWizard = sub
{
    my %dateHash = ();
    my @sortedDates =
       sort
       {
           ($dateHash{$a} ||= transDate($a))
           <=>
           ($dateHash{$b} ||= transDate($b))
       }
       @startDates;
    return $sortedDates[0];
};

# johngg's method.
#
my $rcJohnGG = sub
{
    return
    (
       map  {join q{-}, reverse split /-/}
       sort
       map  {join q{-}, reverse split /-/}
       @startDates
    )[0];
};

# Run all three on data to prove they come up with
# the same answer.
#
print q{$rcCog->()        - }, $rcCog->(), qq{\n};
print q{$rcJediWizard->() - }, $rcJediWizard->(), qq{\n};
print q{$rcJohnGG->()     - }, $rcJohnGG->(), qq{\n};

# Run the benchmark
#
cmpthese (50,
   {
      Cog        => $rcCog,
      JediWizard => $rcJediWizard,
      JohnGG     => $rcJohnGG
   });

# JediWizard's date translation routine.
#
sub transDate
{
    my $date = shift;
    $date =~ s/(\d{2})-(\d{2})-(\d{4})/$3$2$1/;
    return $date;
}
[download]

And these are the results

$rcCog->()        - 13-01-2000
$rcJediWizard->() - 13-01-2000
$rcJohnGG->()     - 13-01-2000
             Rate JediWizard        Cog     JohnGG
JediWizard 6.00/s         --        -0%       -61%
Cog        6.00/s         0%         --       -61%
JohnGG     15.2/s       153%       153%         --
[download]

Looks like your hunch about speed was correct in that you and JediWizard pan out about the same (seems to go either way over several runs but the one I captured here was a dead heat). However, my simpler solution appears to be consistently quicker.

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG

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