note kennethk This definitely sounds like a job for [doc://perlretut|regular expressions]. You should be able to grab the word to the left of <c>searching</c> [doc://perlretut#Using-character-classes], specifically <c>\S</c>, which "represents any non-whitespace character". You can then use that to write your own sorting routine, as described in [doc://sort]. Don't forget that [doc://perlop#Equality-Operators|cmp] is case sensitive, so you may want to use [doc://lc] in your comparison. <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-712372"> <hr /> <p>#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.</p> </div></div> 1003644 1003644