Thanks for the feedback and ideas, but I couldn't get any of these ideas to work for me.  They do work if all I wanted to do is sort a hash by values.  But trying to drop such a sorted hash into the CGI directive, scrolling_list() seems to be too much for the module--it either fails or it still sorts according to key or it doesn't sort at all.

Anyway, I've worked around it. The content of my values already read, "$client_name - $clientid" with the key reading, "$clientid."  So I changed my scrolling_list to read simply like this:

  print $q->scrolling_list(-name=>'acct_num',
                           -values=> [sort values %clients]
                           );

[download]

This gives me the alphabetical sort based on the client names (e.g., values) that I need.  It does make the HTML option select value the same as the label (e.g., client name - client id)--granted, very messy.  But I put the following line in the next CGI script that parses out the data entered in the first script:

    $acct_num = (split/ \- /, $acct_num)[-1];

[download]

This has solved my immediate problem.  However, if anyone can contribute more comments to my original question, I would glad to have them for my education and for those who might read this posting in the future.  Thanks.

In reply to Re: More Sorted Business with Hashes by Spenser
in thread More Sorted Business with Hashes by Spenser

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