You probably need to take a slightly-different approach in building your data structure:  

1. Initialize an empty array.
2. Use a regular expression to compress all occurrences of multiple blanks into a single blank.
3. split the string on blanks into a temporary array.
4. Loop through this array, and split each element in turn, based on commas.   For each element, push a hashref onto the array in step #1.
5. Now, you can sort that array (from #1), using a function that considers the hash-elements.   The difference here is that there is only one array being sorted, and each element within that array is a hashref containing two keys.