if Dumper outputs what you state above, and the loop over keys %$var outputs the array refs, then either your perl is broken or you're not posting your complete code.
it's always recommendable to post a full code example with its output copied and pasted and not retyped.
i think you retyped because you say this is the output from Dumper: 
#         'STOP'=>[
#                  'G234_STOP''
#                  '60'
#                 ]

[download]
can't be, there's two apostrophes and a missing comma.
here's my complete example: 
tina@lux:~> perl -wle'
sub test {
  my %vars;
  $vars{DATE} = ["G234_DATE","ZERO"];
  $vars{STOP} = ["G234_STOP","60"];
  return \%vars;
}
my $vars = test();
foreach $key (keys(%$vars)){
    print $key;
}'
STOP
DATE
tina@lux:~>

[download]

In reply to Re: Whats happening to my hash ref. by tinita
in thread Whats happening to my hash ref. by Scarborough

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