Sorting a Hastable by Key

VasilMichev is right, there's actually no way to guarantee the order of a hashtable. I come up against this all the time when using them to create PSCustomObjects and wanting to control the order of the properties.

Instead you'll want to use an ordered dictionary, in most cases you won't notice a difference (and if you do I'd love to hear about the use case!)

If you want to jump straight to creating an ordered dictionary, add an [ordered] when you're initiating it:

$myHashTable = [ordered] @{}

If you can't control the order in which you're adding items you can sort a hashtable into an ordered dictionary:

# Standard hashtable

$myHashTable = @{}

# Fill with random ordered data

$myHashTable.Add("1", 'Test1')
$myHashTable.Add("5", 'Test5')
$myHashTable.Add("3", 'Test3')
$myHashTable.Add("2", 'Test2')
$myHashTable.Add("4", 'Test4')

# Create an ordered dictionary

$orderedDictionary = [ordered] @{}

# Sort the keys, add key and ke's value to dictionary

foreach ($Key in ($myHashTable.Keys | Sort-Object)) {
    $orderedDictionary.Add($Key, $myHashTable.$Key) 
}