Hmmm well there's a lot of code and I'm not sure what you are trying to do exactly but lets see if I can show you something that tackles your problem on a smaller scale.

my @really_big_array = ({fruit=>apple},{vegitable=>'lettuce'},{fruit=>
+'oranges'},{vegitable=>'carrot'});

# put all entries with a 'fruit' key in a new array
my @smaller_array = ();
foreach(@really_big_array) {
    push(@smaller_array,$_) if($_->{fruit} ne "");
}
[download]

If you didn't want to do it by key you could test the value of the key against something, my example if you wanted all the apples (say you have another key for type). You could do:

push(@smaller_array,$_) if($_->{fruit} eq "apple");

Hope that helps, Reply if it doesn't make sense
Chris