First off, an important thing to note is whether or not you're using a single-dimensional array where each element is a string of the form "A ######## A######### #########.##" or a two-dimensional array where $array31 would be "00005460" (in your above example).

Now, you could sort this as a single-dimensional array (and, in fact, some elegant sorting algorithms do so), but I would recommend converting this to a two-dimensional array.

There are a number of ways to do this. The best way is to use unpack. So, you'd have something like: 

my @new_array = ();
foreach my $element (@array) {
    my @temp = unpack("A A8 A1A10 A12", $element);
    push @new_array, \@temp;
}

[download]

Once that's done, I suggest doing a sort like: 

my @sorted_array = sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] ||
                                   $a->[3] <=> $b->[3] } @new_array;

[download]

(Yes, I know I'm 2 hrs behind the curve ... I started typing right away, but meetings suck!)

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

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