in reply to EBCDIC sort

Assuming that you got the last two strings in your sorted example the wrong way around; Ie. '12h' should sort before '123' according to the logic of the rest of the example? (Ignore this if you didn't, but explain better :)

Using an ST. Transliterate the strings to map the characters to the collating sequence desired, sort and then discard the transliterated values:

@a = qw[ ased12 frtg Frth zdcs 123 12h awq ];; print for map { $_->[0] } sort{ $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] } map{ (my $t = $_) =~ tr[aAbBcCdDeEfFgGhHiIjJkKlLmMnNoOpPqQrRsStTuUvVwWx +XyYzZ0-9] [\x00-\x3e]; [ $_, $t ] } @a;; ased12 awq frtg Frth zdcs 12h 123

Update: Actually, skip the ST. Just tranliterating on the way in and back again on the way out works out much (65%) quicker:

@a = qw[ ased12 frtg Frth zdcs 123 12h awq ]; print for map{ tr[\x00-\x3e][aAbBcCdDeEfFgGhHiIjJkKlLmMnNoOpPqQrRsStTuUvVwWxXyYzZ +0-9]; $_; } sort map{ tr[aAbBcCdDeEfFgGhHiIjJkKlLmMnNoOpPqQrRsStTuUvVwWxXyYzZ0-9][\x00-\ +x3e]; $_; } @a; ased12 awq frtg Frth zdcs 12h 123

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