Your idea of extracting year, month and day then concatenating them so they sort naturally is fine. You could take it a little further and apply a Guttman Rosler Transform instead of a sort routine. This node has an explanation and this is the paper on the technique. I think split might be an easier way of extracting date elements than a regex.

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ perl -E '
> @dates = qw{
>    10/02/2004
>    02/01/2004
>    01/02/2004
>    01/06/2004
>    01/02/2005
>    01/12/2004
>    08/18/2010
>    };
> say for
>    map { substr $_, 8 }
>    sort
>    map { join q{}, ( split m{/} )[ 2, 0, 1 ], $_ }
>    @dates;'
01/02/2004
01/06/2004
01/12/2004
02/01/2004
10/02/2004
01/02/2005
08/18/2010
knoppix@Microknoppix:~$

[download]

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG

In reply to Re: Sorting Dates Issue by johngg
in thread Sorting Dates Issue by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.