> Unfortunately, when creating some sparse hashs of arrays I do rely upon autovivification

no autovivification does pretty much what you (seem to) want, observation and reading is safe, but setting vivifies.

Choroba already pointed you to autovivification

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
see Wikisyntax for the Monastery

In reply to Re^3: Defined test creates non-empty hash value by LanX
in thread Defined test creates non-empty hash value by glendeni

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