From: Daniel Carrera <dcarrera@...>
Date: 2003-03-18T08:59:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Accessing hash values sorted by their keys

On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 08:49:45AM +0900, Josef 'Jupp' Schugt wrote:
> Is an elegant way of doing this?
> 
> h.keys.sort.each { |key|
>   puts h[key]
> }
> 
> works but seems unneccarily complicated.

I don't think that this looks complicated, but here is an alternative:

h.sort will return an array of arrays.  Like this:

>> h = { "name" => "Daniel", "field" => "Math" }
=> {"name"=>"Daniel", "field"=>"Math"}
>> h.sort
=> [["field", "Math"], ["name", "Daniel"]]

So Hash#sort will sort by the keys and return a 2-dimmensional array.
So your snipet could be written as:

h.sort.each { |item|
    puts item[0]
}

I don't know if you think that's any simpler.

But if all you really want is to print the key values, just do:

puts h.keys.sort

But I suspect that this is not what you really want to do and your snipet 
was just an example.

-- 
Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant.  Math Dept.
University of Maryland.  (301) 405-5137