We don't call them associative arrays in Perl. They're called hashes.

Hashes are inherently unsorted. You can't sort them. You can however get a list of the keys for the hash, and sort that list. The keys function will give you the keys for a hash; the sort function sorts lists.

my %data = (
   c => 3,
   b => 1,
   a => 2,
);

print "Sorted by key...\n";
for my $key (sort keys %data) {
   print "$key : $data{$key}\n";
}

print "Sorted by value...\n";
for my $key (sort { $data{$a} <=> $data{$b} } keys %data) {
   print "$key : $data{$key}\n";
}
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