None of these repsonses sort the array. I would have thought that this solution would be flakey unsorted since hashs can come out in any order they please...

I do flattening for comparison by shoving a hashref into an array ( @foo = %{$foo} ) and then sorting the array ( @foo = sort @foo ) and flattening that into a string.,p> The obvious problem with this is that if you have a hash where the keys/values were transposed then it would still appear equal. Similar situations will occur with other data anomolies.

Not a problem in my case, but worth remembering.