Here's what I get out of it. A hash is just a list which happens to be interpreted in pairs, right? So when you return it is scalar context (somehow), it returns what you would expect, 10/14 or something like that. But if you try and treat it as a hash later, it sees it (10/14) and notices that you don't have a value for the hash, just a key. So that's why you seem to be getting the "odd # of elements" error. It thinks you're trying to make a hash out of a one element list

As for how to fix this, we'd of course need the code.