I think one of the other posters mentioned a way to get the column names (outside of using the fetchrow_hashref) but, if the query is static you can just create an array of column names and create your own hash, since the fetchrow_arrayref returns data in the order of the SQL select column order. Maybe, 
my @cols = ('field1','field2','field3');      

while ( my $row = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref ) {
    # create a hash ref to assign values to cols
    my $tmp = {};
    @$tmp{@cols} = @$row;                     
    push @xml_array, $tmp;                    
}
# Access fields like so...
print $xml_array[0]->{field1},"\n";

[download]
I've used this quite a bit in code where I'm reading in files which don't have the column names in them as a header. This should get you a hash per record which sounds like what you want.

In reply to Re^5: DBI hashref does not return data in order of query by tuxz0r
in thread DBI hashref does not return data in order of query by hallikpapa

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