The closest way of explaining what I need is that I need to store not just what is in each hash key of 1{}. 2{}, but I physically need to store the top most level of each hash key. The json format cannot be modified in any way.

I can use $data->{1}->{stuff} to get the value of stuff, and so on. So what am I missing to simply read through and loop line by line and get $data->{??????}. I would like to stick with the JSON package to learn the format structure better before exploring other packages.