fruiture,
I am not looking for a way to store the hash in a specific order. In my post, I acknowledged that hash keys do not come out in the order they are created. I was looking for a way to have the output automatically sorted (via some magic such as artist provided) into a pre-determined format when it came out un-ordered. Thanks for mentioning Data::Dumper - it made me think of something. I may be able to use it if I decide to stay with a hash and not start over.
I was looking for a way to have the output automatically sorted [...] into a pre-determined format when it came out un-ordered.
that's sort then. It depends on what your "pre-determined format" means.(?) I was confused by your example because it dictated the keys to be output in some order (just as the example output displayed no generic order but some specific one) and that's of course impossible to be done generically unless you specify this order without enumarating it. So we end up with sort() or some Hash-tying module that actually stores order of insertion (as you've been pointed to).