Your split is giving you the following list: ( ' John 20', ' Bill 34', ' Jane 28',' Wall 18', ' Tom 19'). Then when you sort and assign that list to a hash, it looks like:

my %hash_list = ( ' Bill 34' => ' Jane 28',
                  ' John 20' => ' Tom 19' ,
                  ' Wall 18' =>
                );
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spliting on white space will fix things. A nicer data representation would help, but sometimes you have to work with what you get.

After Compline,
Zaxo