Also note that your third level key in the example is the literal word "key". Perl puts quotes around "bare words" that are in the position of hash keys. If you mean't this as a variable (it's lower case, unlike the other keys), then you need a dollar sign before it. This is an easy mistake to make when you're a newbie coming from another language. (Also, don't start relying on bare word keys, since this feature will probably go away in Perl6.)