in reply to Associated Array Appending Unwillingly

First of all, a little bit of terminology: the "object" you're referring to is called an associative array. Not "associated". They're also commonly called hashes because their implementation is based on the concept of a hashing function.

Said this, if what is happening what both I and everyone else thus far are guessing, i.e. that you failed to properly declare a certain hash as lexically scoped to your sub, then it is worth repeating the single most precious piece of advice we usually give to Perl newbies:

use strict; use warnings;
Maybe you already do. Maybe you don't and chances are that this is the case, taking into account your post.

To be sure, let me rephrase the above advice in these terms: "let perl do all that it can to help you avoid trivial mistakes".

Incidentally, use code tags just like quite anybody else for your pieces of code rather than ad-hoc visually disturbing (IMHO) formatting.