in reply to Check for existance & definedness for Hash and Array references

When dealing with references, it's often possible for the reference to be undefined. If that's possible here, you want to make sure you got a hash ref, and that the reference hash has some elements.

if ($hash_ref && %$hash_ref)

On the other hand, if you know getHashRef never returns undef, then you don't need to check that.

if (%$hash_ref)