problems sorting an associative array...

hi. any help would be mych appreciated! i'm trying to sort an associative array, but when i do, the key is converted into a number (it should be a string). ie: $email_array["test@email.com"]=1; $email_array["test2@email.com"]=4; $email_array["test3@email.com"]=10; rsort ($email_array); i'm trying to sort by the value and then echo out the key and value together, but when i do, the key is always a number, rather than the email address that i wanted. any ideas?? thanks, ben