Great! The output (more of the 2nd one) is what I was looking for. I guess I'll include it in the question next time.

The HoA won't work for me, because in my actual code: in the AoA/AoH, the "inner" array/hash (the references) are 6 strings, not numbers. The "outer" array is the a list of all these "sets" of strings (which come from a search engine type of code and needs to be sorted).

>(How do you indent?)>(which also means I'm going to create a more complex sorting method, where I sort the "outer" array by certain *values* of the hash, or elements by certain elements of the "inner" array).

Should I include this type of background in my questions?

Thanks a lot, I'm going to try and understand these codes.

Thanks for explaining map{@$_}...$_ really screws me up, I take it that one comes from the elements of @all_matches

.