in reply to Retrieving an anonymous hash

I wonder whether you really want to move it to it's own hash. That involves making a copy of the anonymous hash in the AoH. I would suggest what you want is to assign ( to a scalar or to some other object ) a referencec to the anonymous hash, so you can manipulate it without involving a lengthy addressing procedure:

my $hashRef = $arrayOfHashes[0]; my @hashKeys = keys %$hashRef; # or more realistically ... for my $key ( keys %$hashRef ) { something involving $hashRef->{$key}; }

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