Hello techman2006,

Your question implies that the code shown works correctly. But what happens if you have an odd number of elements in the hash? Running your code with %hash = ( 1 => 'a', 2 => 'b', 3 => 'c', 4 => 'd', 5 => 'e' ) I get:

16:51 >perl 786_SoPW.pl
Total keys are 5
$VAR1 = {
          '1' => 'a',
          '5' => 'e'
        };
$VAR1 = {
          '4' => 'd',
          '3' => 'c'
        };
$VAR1 = [
          {
            '1' => 'a',
            '5' => 'e'
          },
          {
            '4' => 'd',
            '3' => 'c'
          }
        ];

16:51 >
[download]

which shows that the fifth element is left out altogether.

Anyway, here is my solution, a variation on hdb’s approach which uses the natatime function from List::MoreUtils:

#! perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dump      qw( pp );
use List::MoreUtils qw( natatime );

my  $i    = 1;
my  %hash = map { $i++ => $_ } 'a' .. 'e';
print 'Initial hash: ', pp(\%hash), "\n";

my $it = natatime 2, sort { $a <=> $b } keys %hash;
my @array_of_hashes;

while (my @keys = $it->())
{
    my %new_hash = map { ( $_, $hash{$_} ) } @keys;
    push @array_of_hashes, \%new_hash;
}

print 'Array of hashes: ', pp(\@array_of_hashes), "\n";
[download]

Update: Changed 'a' .. 'j' to 'a' .. 'e', and the first argument to natatime from 4 to 2, to match the output shown.

Output:

16:54 >perl 786_SoPW.pl
Initial hash: { 1 => "a", 2 => "b", 3 => "c", 4 => "d", 5 => "e" }
Array of hashes: [{ 1 => "a", 2 => "b" }, { 3 => "c", 4 => "d" }, { 5 
+=> "e" }]

16:55 >
[download]

Hope that helps,

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