Update: It's the eval as roger implicitly pointed out in his reply as well. Time to be explicit. From man perlfunc on exists

Given an expression that specifies a hash element or array ele- ment, returns true if the specified element in the hash or array has ever been initialized, even if the corresponding value is undefined. The element is not autovivified if it doesn't exist.

You are autovifying.

You can see this by modifying your code as such.. (use Data::Dumper) 
.
.
.
            print "----\n";
            print Dumper $data;
            my $ref = qq|\$data->{$k}$path|;
            print "String: $ref\n";
            if (my $val = eval($ref)) {
                push @results, ref($val) ? $val : eval "\\$ref";
            }

            if (exists $data->{$k}) {
                print Dumper $data;
                push @results, rec_data($path, $data->{$k});
.
.
.

[download]
Your eval is creating the a-formentioned structure. You may wanna break down your search structure in a different way.
Here's the output from above. You are creating a circular reference. 
$VAR1 = {
          'foo' => {
                     'baz' => 'baz',
                     'bar' => 'bar'
                   },
          'bar' => {
                     'baz' => 'baz'
                   }
        };
String: $data->{foo}->{foo}->{bar}
$VAR1 = {
          'foo' => {
                     'foo' => {},
                     'baz' => 'baz',
                     'bar' => 'bar'
                   },
          'bar' => {
                     'baz' => 'baz'
                   }
        };

[download]

Play that funky music white boy..

In reply to Re: searching nested structures by exussum0
in thread searching nested structures by IOrdy

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