Brilliant, thanks so much for the help. For anyone else who wants to parse companies house API for officer and director data this code now does exactly what I want: 
use warnings;
use strict;
use JSON;
use Data::Dumper;
use Ref::Util qw(is_arrayref is_hashref);

my $companyNumber = 'NF001553';
my $request =  "https://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/company
+/".$companyNumber."/officers";
my $curl = `curl -s --user youwillneedtoreplacethiswithyourapikey:""  
+$request` || die "Problem with CURL call\n";
my $decodedJSON = decode_json($curl) or die "this is not JSON\n";
if (is_hashref($decodedJSON)) {
    if (exists $decodedJSON->{items}) {
        for my $item (@{ $decodedJSON->{items} }) {
                if (exists $item->{name}) {
                    print $item->{name}."\n";
                    }
                if (exists $item->{address}){
                    if (is_hashref($item->{address})){
                        if (exists $item->{address}->{address_line_1})
+{ print $item->{address}->{address_line_1}."\n";}
                        if (exists $item->{address}->{address_line_2})
+{ print $item->{address}->{address_line_2}."\n";}
                        if (exists $item->{address}->{locality}){ prin
+t $item->{address}->{locality}."\n";}
                        if (exists $item->{address}->{region}){ print 
+$item->{address}->{region}."\n";}
                        if (exists $item->{address}->{postal_code}){ p
+rint $item->{address}->{postal_code}."\n";}
                        }                    
                    }
                }
            }        
        }

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In reply to Re^4: Parsing the data returned from the companies house API by irtuk
in thread Parsing the data returned from the companies house API by irtuk

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