Because of the way the actual script is structured, I already had a hash of hashes, and I was trying to avoid creating a hash of hashes of hashes (HoHoH?) by creating the HoHs with soft references. However, after reading "Why it's stupid to 'use a variable as a variable name' ", I now realize that it's really just easier to deal with the three dimensional hash. Thanks again for the Perl Wisdom.