Yes - everything does get 'squashed'. Internally, an array and a hash are much the same - it's just a hash is an array with an even number of paired values. So you can coerce from hash to array and back again. That's what's happening here.

Probably the easiest way of handling passing a whole hash into a subroutine is by reference. E.g. invoke your sub with:

my_sub ( $value, \%myhash );

[download]

And within the sub:

my ( $value, $hashref ) = @_;
foreach my $key ( keys %$hashref )
{
  print "$key = $$hashref{'$key'}\n";
}

[download]

Although you should note that a has passed by reference - if you modify it within the sub, it'll modify the 'source instance'. Read 'perlref' for more detail.

In reply to Re^2: Passing a scalar and hash as subroutine arguments by Preceptor
in thread Passing a scalar and hash as subroutine arguments by jktstance

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.