I'm pretty sure that what's going on is that the $a <=> $b is forcing its arguments to intify (which they do by prefix, or to 0 if no numeric prefix is found). As you've found, this is often the Right Thing(tm). You can shut warnings.pm up about it (and make it clear to anyone reading your code that you intend to sort them numerically) by using int($a) <=> int($b); int() seems to work just as happily on strings as on reals, and since it returns a number, <=> is happy.

Update: Magical Mystery String Numerification (for values of Magical Mystery equal to "what atof(3) does on this platform") is explained on p. 59 of the 3rd Edition Camel.

Update II: s/strict/warnings/ Thanks jryan!

--
F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
Found a typo in this node? /msg me
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!

In reply to Re: Sort Says "not numeric" then sorts numeric anyway? by FoxtrotUniform
in thread Sort Says "not numeric" then sorts numeric anyway? by Cody Pendant

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