hmmm, I must admit that I learned something today: after many years of working with Perl I never knew that newlines from your source code are preserved in double-qouted strings but it seems they really are.
OK, forget the bit about HAVING to put the \n in your strings although I would still advice to do that if you want nelines because it is a nightmare having to figure out how where the spaces end and where there is an actual newline when editing your code.
However, the main point of my reply remains valid: don't try to stuff formatting into your data structure unless you really have to. Format the data as and when you need to print it and store it as pure data. I also think that it is true that the OP hasn't got the right data structure yet to present his data.

In reply to Re^3: Multiline Hash - how to get rid of formatting? by tospo
in thread Multiline Hash - how to get rid of formatting? by klassisc

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.