Meino wrote:

>  In my program there is a hash of this form
>
> 	   a={ "<string_a>" => [<val1>,<val2>,<val3>],
> 		   "<string_b>" => [<val4>,<val5>,<val6>],
> 		   "<string_c>" => [<val7>,<val8>,<val9>]
> 		   }
>
>   I am looking for a short and handy way to produce an array out of
> this, which looks like:
>
> 	 b=[[<val1>,<val2>,<val3>],[<val4>,<val5>,<val6>],[<val7>,<val8>,<val9>]]
>
>  without iterating over the hash.

I presume you mean you just want an array of the *values* in the hash?

  b = a.values

If you want the values sorted according to the order of the keys:

  b = a.keys.sort.map { |k| a[k] }

Cheers,
Gavin