ASP Classic Associative Array

Use the scriptiing dictionary object which is available on later versions of ASP Classic (all still commonly in use).

Note: Both Access VBA and VB Classic use a collection for this but collections are not supported in ASP Classic.

Looping Through An ASP Dictionary

Here's some code that adds a few items to a dictionary and then loops through them using a for each loop.

Dim StateList

Dim Key

  
set StateList = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.Dictionary")
 
StateList.Add "CA", "California"
StateList.Add "NV", "Nevada"
StateList.Add "FL", "Florida"

For Each Key in StateList
  Response.Write Key & " is " & StateList(Key) & "<br>"
Next

Here's one more example showing how to loop through Request.QueryString. Just to show you that you can.

Dim Key

For each Key in Request.QueryString

 Response.Write Key & "=" & Request.QueryString(Key)

Next

Exists and Remove

Use Exists to check if a key is in the associative array and Remove to delete it. It's a good idea to check if an element exists prior to deleting it. Here's how:

If StateList.Exists("FL") Then

    StateList.Remove("FL")

End If

If you fail to check if an element exists and it doesn't, you will get the following error:

Microsoft VBScript runtime  error '800a802b'

Element not found

/path/yourpage.asp, line 51

Sorting

No built-in sort function. However, Microsoft provided a good example of how to do this at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/246067.