Thank you Chris, Dan and Thomas for your replies. I really appreciate your insight, and I will look into the information you have given me.
Dan, I've never heard of a "treap" or "red-black tree", so I'll be interested to research these. Thomas, Thanks very much for giving me further knowledge on xml and ECMAScript (I continually get this confused with javascript!). In this project, I'm using Adobe InDesign with javascript (which is probably ECMAScript). For xml parsing, it looks like Adobe uses the E4X XML Object, so I'm trying to go by those rules. I'm new to xml, so I might be doing this all the wrong way. Currently I'm looping through each element (in the XML Object), knowing what to do by the element type name and attributes given me. In certain circumstances I'm needing things ordered by the id attribute, and as mentioned the elements will always be a different set of data. I'm looking for a quick way to do this instead of a bubble sort. Further down the line I'm hoping to incorporate Python and will probably use the ElementTree module. I did have a couple of questions from your reply though: > var o = {}; > o[5] = "price"; > o[1] = "copyright"; > o[3] = "address"; > Then: > for (var prop in o) > { > /* get prop or o[prop] */ > } If using this object instance, how were you thinking of putting this in index order? Remember, I'm needing the original items "price", "copyright" and "address" in numerical order by what the id attributes are. So I'd need it to end up being in this order - ["copyright", "address", "price"]. > The variable name `x' should also be reserved for non-counters, e. g. object > references. Use i, j, k, and so forth in good programming tradition here > instead. Can you share a website that goes into more detail on this good variable naming? By the way, thanks for all the links you shared… I have bookmarked all of these - they look incredibly useful! Thanks again for the help! Jay -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list