I'm not going to tell you how to fix this because you almost certainly don't want to be doing that - essentially you are looking to introduce a second level of hash-like functionality into your logic which you can do without the use of the horrible soft references - observe:

use strict;


my %hashes = (
               other0 => {
                          'cat0'=>'3',
                          'cat1'=>'3'
                         },
               other1 => {}
             );

my @catnames = ('other0','other1');

print $hashes{$catnames[0]}->{cat0},"\n";
[download]

I would recommend taking a look at perlref and perlreftut in the first instance if you have any more questions about this.

/J\