When you read your file you construct an array with one element per line where you actually need two. Interpolating an array into a string is only going to result in a single string being assigned to your hash. In any case, qw( ... ) doesn't interpolate so you were assigning the string "@con" to your hash. You can assign an array to a hash but you will get a warning if there aren't an even number of elements..

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;

my $inFile = q{spw612167.dat};
open my $inFH, q{<}, $inFile
   or die qq{open: $inFile: $!\n};

my @conArr = ();
while ( <$inFH> )
{
    chomp;
    push @conArr, split m{=>};
}

close $inFH
   or die qq{close: $inFile: $!\n};

my %conHash = @conArr;
print Data::Dumper->Dump([\@conArr, \%conHash], [qw{*conArr *conHash}]
+);
[download]

Here's the output

@conArr = (
            'article',
            'art',
            'chapter',
            'chap',
            'section',
            'sec'
          );
%conHash = (
             'chapter' => 'chap',
             'article' => 'art',
             'section' => 'sec'
           );
[download]

I hope this helps you.

Cheers,

JohnGG