Okay what you are asking is fairly simple once you think about what you want.
What you are doing is something like this:

$buddys = %data;

This is not what you want at all. What you actually want is a scalar which is a reference to %data to be stored in $buddys which you can then dereference in your loop.
This means you want the equivelent of this:

$buddys = \%data;

In _init_Authentication you are already doing half of this ie:

$self->{'buddy_list'} = \%buddylist;

And then in BuddyList, $self->{'buddy_list'} still contains a reference to the hash you want as it does when you try using directly in main. So all you need to return is $self->{'buddy_list'} which then gets put in $buddys and can be used as you wish.

Hope that was what you wanted to know.

In reply to Re: Packages, references, & data hiding... by repson
in thread Packages, references, & data hiding... by zzspectrez

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.