From: Ruby Baby <ruby@...>
Date: 2004-03-04T06:01:45+09:00
Subject: Re: why are Hashes so unsorted? what's your solution?

Thanks for your help and advice, everyone.

The description, below, is correct.

Since I learned PHP first, I started heavily relying on this,
not knowing it was a PHP quirk.

So when I learned Ruby, I assumed "Hash" was the same as PHP's
"associative array" and was surprised they weren't in order.



> PHP blurs the lines between hashes, 
> arrays, whatever you want to call them. There is just one construct, 
> which they call an Array. Each item in the array can have both a hash 
> key (a string) and an index (an integer). if you write "myarray['test'] 
> = item", an index automatically gets created in addition to the hash 
> key.
> Additionally, PHP arrays have an order, which is not necessarily the 
> same as the order given by the indices. In fact, it is *very* often 
> different. Usually it is the order in which items were added to the 
> array. Calling "each()" iterates over the array in the hidden order. If 
> you want, you can sort the array/hash by the internal/hidden ordering, 
> and indices and hashes are unchanged, but iterating over it with 
> "each()" is different.
> 
> Of course, this sounds confusing all thrown together like this, but it 
> really isn't that bad. You can do some nifty tricks, all because of the 
> strange hybrid php hash/lists. :)