Several things here:

1) The reason this isn't working is because those hashes that you're returning are flattened into a big list, which is then assigned to the *first* hash in the list you're assigning to. The rest of the hashes get undefined. Read perlman:perlsub for more details.

2) The second problem is that you probably don't want to do it like this, anyway. Investigate using an array of hash references to hold your data, something like this: 

@assign = (
    {
        title => "Slashdot",
        category => "Tech News",
        blurb => "News for nerds. Stuff that matters.",
        url => "http://www.slashdot.org/"
    },
    {
        title => "Perl Monks",
        category => "Perl",
        blurb => "Perl advice.",
        url => "http://www.perlmonks.org/"
    }
);

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Now you can access your data like: 
for my $site (@assign) {
    print "Site:\n";
    for my $field (keys %$site) {
        print "\t", $field, " = ", $site->{$field}, "\n";
    }
}

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Or, if you want a particular field of a particular site, 
print "Title: ", $assign[0]{title}, "\n";

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Read perlman:perlref or perlreftut for more details on using references.

(And think about returning a reference from your subroutine rather than the actual hash/array.)

In reply to Re: Passing Hashes In and Out of Functions by btrott
in thread Passing Hashes In and Out of Functions by nickcave25

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