tsvi,
Can this be doen in perl?

Here are a couple of Perl's mottos:

• Makes hard things possible and easy things easy
• There Is More Than One Way To Do It (TIMTOWTDI)

In this particular case, I would suggest considering changing your data structure. Depending on your situation, you may want an Array of Arrays (AoA) or even an Array of Hashes (AoH). Here are a couple of examples:

# AoA sorted by first name
my @names = (
    [ qw( David   Gets  ) ],
    [ qw( Richard Storm ) ],
);
my @sorted = sort { $a->[0] cmp $b->[0] } @names;

# AoH sorted by last name
my @names = (
    { fn => 'David',   ln => 'Gets' },
    { fn => 'Richard', ln => 'Storm' },
);
my @sorted = sort { $a->{ln} cmp $b->{ln} } @names;
[download]

Now there are more efficient ways to do this sort and I will leave that up to you - take a look at Super Search. I will be using Schwartzian Transform to answer the question you actually asked.

# Sorted by first name
my @names = qw( David|Gets Richard|Storm );
my @sorted = map  { $_->[0] }
             sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] }
             map  { [ $_, split /\|/, $_, 2 ] }
             @names;
[download]