in reply to how do I sort numerically on sections of data that is alphanumeric

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; }

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

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

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