Thanks turnstep, btrott and chromatic!! Now it might get more complicated, or at least messy if I had multiple keys in the hashes, some of which were strings and some of which were numbers. Like in addition to age and name if I had Last Name (string), salary (number), car (string), model year (number), etc. Then I would have to test for every one. That's why I used a reg exp in the first place. But I like the idea of testing outside of the sort for efficiency, I will definitely use that.