I'm still confused about what you're doing. Do you say that you can run code like

use Data::Dumper;

my %hash = initialize_a_hash_somehow();

print 'key/value pairs: ', scalar keys %hash;
print Dumper \%hash;
[download]

... and see printed to the console the number 63 for key/value pairs and a listing of 19 key/values from Dumper? (Also: where's the closing curly bracket for the Dumper output?) If this is the case, something is seriously b0rken in your system!

It seems to me that the first step is to get consistent data printed to the console and then figure out how to print it to a browser.