Well, that’s a very clumsy data structure you have there. And the code is clumsier than it needs to be, on top of that. What’s that count doing? Looks like a no-op to me. And don’t use for(;;), use for(@LIST):

for my $i ( 0 .. $#{ $self->{ keys } } ) {
    my $id = $self->{ keys }->[ $i ];
    # ...
}
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You could write accessor methods for that part of the data structure so you could say something like:

for my $i ( 0 .. $self->max_index() ) {
    my ( $key, $value ) = $self->at( $i );
    # ...
}
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Or maybe an iterator would be better?

my $iter = $self->iterator();

while( my ( $key, $value ) = $iter->() ) {
    # ...
}
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Or you could use one of the modules that implement ordered hashes, such as Tie::IxHash, which will let you write this directly using keys and friends.

Lots of options that depend on what you want to do; for laziness, the tied hash is hard to beat.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Hmmm... just checked count in perldoc... what I was trying to do was to compare the $i with length of the array... I could have sworn count() was the function.

I would write acessors, but I am too lazy (and this search function appears in many objects.. not only one... thats part of the reason I figured an... inline... function (or macro) would work)

The iterator would appear to be something I wanted to ask about in a future post. What would I have to extend (via @ISA) to make use of it?

Though like I said, I was already considering using a Tied hash... thanks for pointing me to the first step.

I agree with Aristotle. You should probably use one of the existing Tie:: modules if what you're after is an ordered hash. If you decide not to do this, than the first solution he posted is much easier to read than what you had. He only forgot to replace
if ($key =~ m!^$id$!) {
with the much more efficient
if ($key eq $id) {

Well, some of the code, yes, I was thinking of making a Tie::Hash. (I think that is the module, it should be easy to figure out)

Infact the idea of @{$self->{keys}} and @{$self->{values}} was taken from from code in articles on using Tie... right now I was mostly just getting it working first. (Well other than trying to cut down on me writting code over and over again)

As per $key eq $id... I've read through a few documents and it is very confusing about how that operator works. Or maybe I am reading too deep into what eq does and how it opperates.

eq is just like ==, except eq compares strings, and == compares numbers.

if($self->{keys}->[$key]){
      # do something with the knowledge that we got the correct key
      # then exit out of function using this loop
}
# do something with the knowledge there is no key with that name
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Not quite... $key contains a name, not an index. doing $self->{keys}->[ $key ] won't work.

I could do $self->{keys}->{$key} but I don't think that would work in the case where I might serialise the object.