in reply to HOA with array slice?

Not sure what you're trying to do here, but it looks like you just want a simple way to access the contents of the array inside your hash. All you have to do is assign a variable to reference the array:
use warnings; use strict; my $hoa = { keyone => ["green","apple"], keytwo => ["purple","plum"] }; my $p; for (sort keys %$hoa) { $p = $hoa->{$_}; print join ' ', @$p; print "\n"; }
You could also use:
print join ' ', @$p[0], @$p[1]; print "\n";
or:
print join ' ', $p->[0], $p->[1]; print "\n";
or just:
for (sort keys %$hoa) { print join ' ', @{$hoa->{$_}}; print "\n"; }