I would reccomend using an array of arrays and sorting the references to the arrays based on the value of the second element. For the sake of argument, I am going to assume that you have colon-delimited fields, one record per line, and that all the data has been loaded into $data.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $data = get_data_from_somewhere;

# First split the data up into a 2D structure
my @struct;
for (split /\n/, $data) { 
    push @struct, [ split /:/ ]
}

# Now we sort the struct on the second element of the nested arrays
@struct = sort { $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] } @struct;
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