Ok - what you have _should_ work, but there is a better solution. You should treat entries just like you treat subject - when you surround the entry index with single quotes, i assumed you really wanted a hash.

Sounds like you need to consider using a Database for this. You would have a table for students, their ID will be the primary key. You will need another table that lists the available subjects, with some unique ID for each one of those. You will need a cross-reference table to join Students with there subjects. It will consist of two fields, one for the Student ID and one for the Subject ID.

From there you will need two similar tables for the entries that links them to the proper subject.

Not using a database on a complex problem like this tends to make your code 700+ lines; using a database on a problem like this tends to make your code MUCH smaller: 

select students.lname, students.fname, subjects.name, entries.name
from students
left join subjects on students.id = subjects.student_id
left join entries  on subjects.id = entries.subject_id
where students.id = ?
order by students.Sex, students.lname, students.fname

[download]
A wham! You now have all subjects and entries for student '?' - and they are ordered by the database, not Perl.

Databases by themselves are beyond the scope of this site, but be sure and read up on DBI.

jeffa

In reply to (jeffa) 5Re: associative array problem by jeffa
in thread associative array problem by Gerryjun

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