As they are, the data structures are not the same, because arrays are ordered collections of items, so that they are different even if they contain the same items, because the item order is different. But if order of the elements is not important to you, why don't you simply sort them before comparing them? Assuming the value of platformid is unique, it'd be quite easy to sort your arrayrefs on that.

Please also note what johngg told you: your @array1 and @array2 have only one element each: a reference to an array containing two elements (which are themselves hashrefs). I am not sure that's really what you want.