in reply to $str to %hash to @ary

At first sight, I spotted a problem right the way. Your code will never work base on your description of the data. Try this (it is your code, with slightly modified testing data):

use Data::Dumper; my $str="27:43:33:21:23:19:27:6"; my %hash=split/:/,$str; foreach my $k(keys %hash) { push (@ary, map{$hash{$k}}(1..$k)); } my $adId=$ary[int(rand(100))]; print Dumper(\%hash);

Your code does not handle the situation where two ads has the same percentage of show time. Well, the fix is not difficult, so I just leave it to you, just switch key/value, use show number as key.