Thank you for the reply but the output was there only to provide output to show people the nature of the data I was working with. This and the other responses allowed me to recognize why I'm seeing the scalar value of the array. I am still wondering if or how I could manage this though and that is what I am still fighting. I want to take what is returned by the subroutine, a list of hashes, and I want to place that into a list. The goal being that the list of hashes for box1 is in index0, list of hashes for box2 is in index1, and so on.