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Does `pulumi stack export` preserve order? I wanted to compare 2 outputs and I get way more differences than I expected - many of them seem to be caused by a different order of the resources.

I haven’t checked that - if you’re right, it might be a good idea to sort the keys before printing the output from `pulumi stack export`.

As a workaround, you can do it yourself quite simply by using `jq` tool.

if you have exported states in JSON files, just `cat` them to `jq` :slightly_smiling_face:
```cat some-older-state.json | jq -S . &gt; formatted-some-older-state.json```

Oh… good question :sweat_smile:. I’ve just assumed it does.

the order most probably won’t be changed and I guess in some cases, you’d like to treat the array as set so the order doesn’t matter

yeah if an array is a set then order does not matter but it does for Diff :disappointed:

anyway, I’ve checked and it looks like `jq` DOES deep sorting

but I’m afraid the issues mentioned above would be a bigger problem

you’d have to match the elements first using their `urn` and then compare their content

I'll give it a try and see how it goes.
I'm trying to solve a problem where I need to move several resources to another region.
However my ComponentResource also contains global resources.
It's a bit of can of worms, I may end up just removing stuff from the state and deleting it manually

Anyway, I think your case is not that weird. Many people might wanna compare the state files. It would be a nice feature to have `pulumi stack diff &lt;state-file-a&gt; &lt;state-file-b&gt;`.

it could visualise the diff in a similar way `pulumi preview` works

it looks like resources are located at `.deployments.resources` and each one of them has `urn` that should be unique

so if I simply sort the resources in this array by `urn`, they should be easily comparable

```❯ cat /tmp/a.json | jq '.'
{
  "deployment": {
    "resources": [
      {
        "urn": "b",
        "data": 2
      },
      {
        "urn": "a",
        "data": 1
      }
    ]
  }
}```
and with the sorting query:
```❯ cat /tmp/a.json | jq '.deployment.resources|=sort_by(.urn)'
{
  "deployment": {
    "resources": [
      {
        "urn": "a",
        "data": 1
      },
      {
        "urn": "b",
        "data": 2
      }
    ]
  }
}```

try to compare results from running:
```pulumi stack export | jq '.deployment.resources|=sort_by(.urn)'```
and see if that helps

this is what I thought about doing! Thank you for saving me some time!