In case the subject isn't entirely clear, what I'm trying to achieve is a sort of an array of hashes by a field which contains the following three keywords -- Local, State, National. The trick is that I need to sort the records in that order. Thus a straight-forward alpha sort will not work.

I checked the Q&A, searched PM and Google and checked my various Perl books to no avail. I have a solution but am hoping a more clever monk could make it more efficient.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my @advocates = (
    {
        fld_title => 'Rec1',
        fld_type => 'National',
    },
    {
        fld_title => 'Rec2',
        fld_type => 'State',
    },
    {
        fld_title => 'Rec3',
        fld_type => 'Local',
    },
    
);
sub by_locale {
    my $a_type;
    my $b_type;
    $a_type = 1 if ($a->{'fld_type'} =~ /local/i);
    $a_type = 2 if ($a->{'fld_type'} =~ /state/i);
    $a_type = 3 if ($a->{'fld_type'} =~ /national/i);
    $b_type = 1 if ($b->{'fld_type'} =~ /local/i);
    $b_type = 2 if ($b->{'fld_type'} =~ /state/i);
    $b_type = 3 if ($b->{'fld_type'} =~ /national/i);
    $a_type <=> $b_type;
}
my @sorted_advocates = sort by_locale @advocates;
warn Dumper("unsorted_advocates", \@advocates);
warn Dumper("sorted_advocates", \@sorted_advocates);
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Thanks for any pointers,