You're right about needing to use a reference to an array for assigning to a hash element, but that way of doing it can be rather wasteful. What you are doing with $Tex{$a} = [@bex] is copying the contents of @bex in to another array and then assign a reference to that new array to $Tex{$a}.

You can avoid the unneccesary copying by just taking a reference to the original array

if (!$Tex{$a}){
    $Tex{$a} = \@bex;
}
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Of course, this only works correctly in a loop if the array you are taking a reference to is scoped to the loop. If not, your method is correct.

\@bex won't work unless you do my @bex in the foreach loop. You mentioned this (in less explicit terms), but I just wanted to be clear. Without the my, all values will be references to the same array. In fact, the OP says he's using [@bex], but the symptoms he's describing are those of \@bex.

\@bex won't work unless you do my @bex in the foreach loop. You mentioned this (in less explicit terms), but I just wanted to be clear.

The scoping doesn't have to be my, local works just fine too:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Data::Dumper::SLC;

my %hash;
our @array;
for my $i ( 0 .. 9 ) {
    local @array = map{ "$i : $_" } 1 .. 5;
    $hash{ $i } = \@array;
}

Dump \%hash, 60;
__END__
c:\Perl\test>junk3
{
    0 => [ '0 : 1', '0 : 2', '0 : 3', '0 : 4', '0 : 5',  ],
    1 => [ '1 : 1', '1 : 2', '1 : 3', '1 : 4', '1 : 5',  ],
    2 => [ '2 : 1', '2 : 2', '2 : 3', '2 : 4', '2 : 5',  ],
    3 => [ '3 : 1', '3 : 2', '3 : 3', '3 : 4', '3 : 5',  ],
    4 => [ '4 : 1', '4 : 2', '4 : 3', '4 : 4', '4 : 5',  ],
    5 => [ '5 : 1', '5 : 2', '5 : 3', '5 : 4', '5 : 5',  ],
    6 => [ '6 : 1', '6 : 2', '6 : 3', '6 : 4', '6 : 5',  ],
    7 => [ '7 : 1', '7 : 2', '7 : 3', '7 : 4', '7 : 5',  ],
    8 => [ '8 : 1', '8 : 2', '8 : 3', '8 : 4', '8 : 5',  ],
    9 => [ '9 : 1', '9 : 2', '9 : 3', '9 : 4', '9 : 5',  ],
}
[download]

The funny thing is that I changed the wording specifically to avoid a correction being required :)

---

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