I'm not going to tell you how to fix this because you almost certainly don't want to be doing that - essentially you are looking to introduce a second level of hash-like functionality into your logic which you can do without the use of the horrible soft references - observe: 

use strict;


my %hashes = (
               other0 => {
                          'cat0'=>'3',
                          'cat1'=>'3'
                         },
               other1 => {}
             );

my @catnames = ('other0','other1');

print $hashes{$catnames[0]}->{cat0},"\n";

[download]
I would recommend taking a look at perlref and perlreftut in the first instance if you have any more questions about this. 

/J\

In reply to Re: Referencing a hash by gellyfish
in thread Referencing a hash by Anonymous Monk

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