What's with all the white space at the end of your keys? That's going to cause problems: 'Fixed_name1     ' does not equal 'Fixed_name1'.

I figured that alright and tried the code with all the spaces but it didn't make any difference. I'm pulling the data from a database that's why the white space is there. That's also how it's being assigned the undef value although I don't know why. Here's the structure of the code that's doing that:

my %ret;
if ( defined( $rv ) and @$rv )
        {
                map { %{$ret{$$_{name}}->{$$_{project}}={$$_{result}}}
+} @$rv;
        }
return %ret;
[download]


Update: I finally managed to get this working the way I wanted. Just thought I'd post how I did it in case it's useful to someone else in the future and wanted to say thanks to everyone that took the time to reply to me. Here's the approach I took:

my ($value1, $value2);
foreach (sort keys %hash)
{
  foreach (sort keys %{$hash{$random_name}})
  {
     foreach $k1 (sort keys %{$hash{$random_name}{$fixed_name1}})
     {
        $value1 = $k1;
     }
     foreach $k2 (sort keys %{$hash{$random_name}{$fixed_name2}})
     {
        $value2 = $k2;
     }
etc.
   }
}
print "$value1\n";
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Worked a charm. My full version has some error checking in case one of the values didn't exist. Did this with some if defined before the foreach and an else { after.

Ah. Well, clearly, all the values of the "leaf" nodes in the structure are undef. What you want is the keys of the bottom level of the struct. E.g.:

my @values = keys %{ $hash{'test1'}{'fixed name'} };
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But is it possible to have a scalar for each "fixed_name" assigned the value of "value"? I suppose a better representation of the hash would be:

$VAR1 = 'random_name                         ';
$VAR2 = {
          'Fixed_name1     ' => {
                            'value    ' => undef
                          },
          'Fixed_name2   ' => {
                            'value    ' => undef
                          }
        };
$VAR3 = 'random_Name                                    ';
$VAR4 = {
          'Fixed_name1       ' => {
                            'value    ' => undef
                          },
          'Fixed_name2   ' => {
                            'value    ' => undef
                          }
        };
[download]

The fixed names are always going to be the same but there will be hundreds of random names. I want to return the value of the fixed name to another function that will display this value on a webpage for each random name. There will only ever be 1 element for value. I hope I'm explaining this better each time and not just making it twice as confusing :-)

It sounds like you just want your structure to be like

$VAR2 = {
          'Fixed_name1     ' => 'value    ',
          'Fixed_name2   '   => 'value    '
        };
[download]

Then your original code would do what you expect. So assign just the value, rather than a hashref that uses the value as a key.

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