Thank you all. The -> notation is great, and as a c programmer, makes me feel at home. I've turned strict on and it now works. Unfortunately, I am currently blind because some modrewrite in some .htaccess file is preventing me from seeing debug info.

Perhaps you can tell me why, using the -> notation, keys do not go in quotes? In the following, what is the type of mykey? It doesn't have quotes, nor a type prefix such as $, %, or @.

$myhash_ref->{mykey};