A few pointers:

• Typing in ALL CAPS is considered impolite.
• Associative arrays in Perl are now more commonly known as hashes.
• The keys in hashes are always strings, so the question is whether or not you want it sorted numerically (I'm assuming 'no')
• And welcome to Perlmonks :) Have fun!

How do you plan to use this? Hashes are inherently unsorted and, therefore, sorting them is useless. Sorting their data and using the output of the sort, however, is quite useful:

foreach my $key (sort keys %hash) {
    print "$key $hash{$key}\n";
}
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my @sorted = sort keys %hash;
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foreach my $key (sort keys %hash) {
   # Do something with $hash{key};
}
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You can also sort the keys by the value they point to...

my @sortedkeys = sort { $hash{$a} cmp $hash{$b} } keys %hash;
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The point is, that you pretty much want to think in terms of unsorted hashes with (when needed) a list of sorted keys.

See sort, and perldata.

One addition to the preceding good advice. If you find yourself having to re-sort the same(sup>1*) hash more than once in your code, a useful optimisation is to keep an array that contains the keys in their sorted order and use that the second and subsequent times.

my %hash = ( your => 1, data => 2, goes = 3, here => 4 );
my @sorted_keys = sort keys %hash;

for( @sort_keys ) {
    print $hash{ $_ };
}
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¹ If you only change the values, ten you can re-use @sorted_keys ok, but if you add or delete keys to/from %hash, then @sorted_keys would need to be regenerated. This is only of real benefit if

• Your keys never change.
• Your hash is very large.

For small hashes, or those where the keys are constantly changing, or if your only iterating the hash once, this idea is best forgotten :)

for my $x(sort {return $a <=> $b} keys %hash)
{
    print "$x = $hash{$x}\n";
}
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First, numerically:

for my $x(sort {return $hash{$a} <=> $hash{$b}} keys %hash)
{
   print "$x = $hash{$x}\n";
}
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for my $x(sort {return $hash{$a} cmp $hash{$b}} keys %hash)
{
   print "$x = $hash{$x}\n";
}
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TIE::HASH::SORTED. GOT IT?

Thanks much. And sorry 'bout them CAPS!! Ron rowhiteny