Based on the prior reply, i was thinking about way to work through this. The prior example work great, but the last time i was doing something with data sorted and sub-sorted by fiedls, i went with the following hash-of-a-hash approach. If you do not need the other data, the hash assignment can be changed to equal "1" as oppoed to $_. Once again, this is only really nessasary if you are doing complex aggregate reporting and sorting on the data ... otherwise i would do the above, as it should be faster. 
my %HASH;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    $HASH{substr($_,2,8)}{substr($_,12,9)} = $_;
}

foreach my $col_2_num (sort keys %HASH) {
    foreach my $col_3_num (sort keys %{ $HASH{$col_2_num} }) {
        print "$col_2_num : $col_3_num : '$HASH{$col_2_num}{$col_3_num
+}'\n";
    }
}

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- Matt-Fu (MZSanford)

In reply to Re: how do I sort numerically on sections of data that is alphanumeric by MZSanford
in thread how do I sort numerically on sections of data that is alphanumeric by shaezi

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