Hardburn is right. And to answer it the other way around, you could also do (using your code):

push(@arrays, [split(/ /,$data[$a])]);
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I.e., create an array where each element in the array is a reference to an anonymous array. Then you can iterate that array with for (@arrays).

What you were doing, as Hardburn points out, is creating a scalar reference to an anonymous array, which contained references to anonymous arrays. That's probably overkill for what you intended to do.

-xdg

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