Your post would be much more readable if you enclosed the code withing <code>...</code tags.

The date format that you have is close to being able to be sorted by an alphanumeric comparison because you have 4 digit years and the months and days have leading zeroes (always are 2 digits).

So in the sort, just reorder the string into the right order and use a single cmp instruction.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my @strings = (
   "PROCESS_DT IN '01/01/2009'", 
   "PROCESS_DT IN '05/23/2006'", 
   "PROCESS_DT IN '01/01/2011'", 
   "PROCESS_DT IN '04/19/2009'", 
   "PROCESS_DT IN '07/01/2009'", );
   
   
@strings = sort { 
                   my ($monthA, $dayA, $yearA) = $a =~ m|(\d+)/(\d+)/(
+\d+)|;
                   my ($monthB, $dayB, $yearB) = $b =~ m|(\d+)/(\d+)/(
+\d+)|;
                          "$yearA$monthA$dayA" cmp "$yearB$monthB$dayB
+"
                }@strings;

print join("\n",@strings),"\n";

__END__
PROCESS_DT IN '05/23/2006'
PROCESS_DT IN '01/01/2009'
PROCESS_DT IN '04/19/2009'
PROCESS_DT IN '07/01/2009'
PROCESS_DT IN '01/01/2011'

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In reply to Re: Sort text string by the date embedded by Marshall
in thread Sort text string by the date embedded by and_noel

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