"However, one of the examples in perldsc is almost identical to something I already tried, following an example in Programming Perl."

I'm not sure that's true. What it seems you're trying to do -- i.e. take an arrayref and turn it into a hash -- isn't really covered in perldsc. The reason I pointed you to it was because of my %hash = $diary_data[0] and the accompanying error about Reference found where even-sized list expected, not because of anything in the other suggestions people made or other things you'd tried; I'm sorry if there was confusion there.

What happens if you try %hash = %{$diary_data[0]->[0]}? (This is a bit of a shot in the dark based on some of your other posts.)

"What confuses me is the fact that I'm following examples straight out of Perl references and getting these errors. I'm starting to wonder if I've found a bug in ARS.pm."

You may be right, but it's probably just a nested data structure that you haven't quite understood yet. Data::Dumper will help a lot, if that's the case (print Dumper($diary_data[0])).

hdp.