Came in tonight to pick up my laptop so I could bring this monster back to the couch im living on and work on it overnight. My post and your reply were still up on my monitor and I took a quick look at both and suddenly realized what I was doing wrong and what exactly your reply meant. So I swapped my keys and values, stopped refering to the new 'value' as a string, and swapped $_ and $data{$_} in the subroutine call and everything was perfect. Guess I just needed another set of eyes. Thanks!