First off, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread. You've all helped me immensely--either by code examples or by giving me perspective on my problem.

I think I've run into a problem that may require me to rethink the process by which I grab these values. It turns out that some of the hashes in %some_hash have different numbers of elements. So it looks something like:

 %some_hash =
    (
      'NEW_YORK' =>
      { 'capital' => 'Albany',
        'colors' => 'red, white, blue',
        'bird' => 'pigeon'
      },
      'MASSACHUSETTS' =>
      { 'capital' => 'Springfield',
        'colors' => 'green, yellow',
      }
    # etc
    );
[download]

This is forcing me to rethink the entire process, and will probably mean that we break %some_hash out into its own file (as some of you suggested). Also my colleague just told me that the utility of what I'm doing (this is a pet project) is somewhat limited for other reasons related to the function of the original script.

But that doesn't temper my gratitude for the attention I've recieved. Thank you Monks. I learned a lot here.

AH