You guessed it. You get to use square brackets for an array, and curly braces for an hash, and the syntax stays consistent thru the whole thing, no matter how deeply your data gets nested.

The only time it gets a little 'funky' is when you want to treat your data like a regular array, for example, in a foreach loop. Actually, perldsc lays it all out. 

### here we tell perl to treat the scalar as a ref
### to an array.
foreach my $item (@{$chapters}){
    print $item->{title};
}

[download]

Side note: Data::Dumper is absolutely a plus. Sprinkle it into every script where you use a complex variable, in fact, sprinkle it everywhere. It's very useful.

In reply to Re^3: Accessing an AoHoAoH by dimar
in thread Accessing an AoHoAoH by bradcathey

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.