>I have no idea what was wrong with me last night. You are absolutely >right, those are not in a sortable format.
All the replies led me down the path of enlightenment:) The string before the "@" will always be the same, in fact, I must error check for this, so no need for a hash, I can just apply the string as I need it. That leaves just the date format to sort in an array and I can write it out however I wish, so taking the SI suggestion that leaves me with a human readable and computer useful single value to simply apply sort to once loaded into an array. So <string>@YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ works for me so long as YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ can sort easily, $ perl -le 'print for sort qw/2006-12-02T07:10:02Z 2008-02-01T07:10:02Z 2006-12-01T07:10:02Z 2005-11-02T07:10:02Z 2005-12-07T07:10:02Z 2006-12-01T07:10:03Z/' 2005-11-02T07:10:02Z 2005-12-07T07:10:02Z 2006-12-01T07:10:02Z 2006-12-01T07:10:03Z 2006-12-02T07:10:02Z 2008-02-01T07:10:02Z Sweet! Thanks everyone! jlc
