After extensively searching the web on the matter, I've found that there's a lot of conflicting information on how to best take a reference to a hash and convert it into an actual, normal hash. I'm hoping you all can clear this up for me.

I've seen thing such as: 
$myref = $sth->fetchrow_hashref();
my %hash = %$myref;

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or 
my %hash = %{$myref};

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Neither of which seem to work. There have been many subtle variations on this, but I won't bore you with their details.

That all said, what is the syntatically correct way to dereference a hashref -- specifically one that's the output of DBI::fetchrow_hashref() -- into a plain, old-fashioned hash, assuming I don't know the names of the keys in the hashref? Of course, if I knew the key names, I'd just set up my new hash by looping through the reference and making a bunch of $hashref->{'keyname'} calls.

Thanks for your help.

Alex Kirk

In reply to Dereferencing hashrefs by schnarff

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