That's not the way associative arrays work. They are stored differently. If you want them to be printed in a certain order, then you must do it explicitly. I think it is really better to think of it as a hash instead of an associative array for that reason. Not all of the rules apply. I commonly use a snippet of code like this when I'm printing hashes: foreach(sort keys %hash){ print $hash{$_}; } -----Original Message----- From: P. S. Starkey [mailto:pstarkey@cinergy.com_strip_this_off] Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 2:06 PM To: beginners@perl.org Subject: associative array not looking like I thought it would I have some perl script (shown below) and I am wondering why the associative array being built ends up looking like the printout of the array as shown after the code. I would have assumed the array entries would have been shown in the same order they are put into the array but that is not happening. %Error=( Error=>"[$ciTDF{'#errval_V'}]: $ciTDF{'#errtext_V'}", "Document Name"=>$ciTDF{'DOC_NAME_V'}, Revision=>$ciTDF{'DOC_REV_V'}, Desc=>"Issuing-could not index to vault", Notes=>"Clean Vault Log"); DB<3> p %Error Document NamePARRYTESTERR12NotesClean Vault LogError[142]: BCI Err : More than one match for a record in the BEF input fileDescIssuing-could not index to vaultRevision1 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscribe@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-help@perl.orgThread Previous | Thread Next