From: Ruby Baby <ruby@...>
Date: 2004-03-03T14:22:44+09:00
Subject: why are Hashes so unsorted? what's your solution?

I try to avoid questions like "Why doesn't Ruby do what ___ does?"

But I'm stumped by hashes and asking for help to find a new solution.

I use MySQL databases a lot.  Let's say I have a query to find the
top-selling albums in my store:

SELECT sku, artistname, albumtitle, sold FROM albums
ORDER BY sold DESC LIMIT 20;

When I get the hash of results from the database, I'm used to making
the "sku" the hash key since it's the only unique identifier.
A perfect hash key.  Used everywhere by my iteration methods.

In PHP, this is no problem.  I get the hash, and I can do the 
"each" iteration on it, and get my top-selling albums in order.

In Ruby, it's an unordered jumble.

Why is that?

And what do you think is the Ruby way solution for what I need to do?


(The simple query I gave above was much simpler, but I have lots and 
lots of MySQL queries where I want the results to come back in the 
order that MySQL gave them, but with full access to the hash results.)



Thanks!