I don't know what you were trying to do, but { @table } IS an anonymous hash with an odd number (1) of elements.

Only if @table contains an odd number of elements. That implies there's something fishy with her HTML.

The HTML I used as an example consists of a table with 4 columns, where column 1 and 3 are attribute names (to be used as hash keys) and columns 2 and 4 are attribute values (to be used as hash values).

Maybe you intended

$hash{$key} = \@table;
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No, if she did that, every hash value would be a reference to the same hash.

The intention is to turn the current list of name/value pairs into a hash. Something like:

@table = ( foo => 10, bar => 20 );
$hashref = { @table };
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