Ha! Right you are. I had missed the fact a spanking new variable was created inside the block (when assigning to the hash reference keys). No "extra fun" for me, it's obvious now.

I was mistakenly thinking that my operator was affecting the existence of keys, values (in that {a} element was autovivified and only [0] element was localized to the block) but not the $x created earlier outside the block. Much thanks to you both for the clue bat.

In reply to Re^2: Variable scope issue- effect of "my" on hash ref keys, values by parv
in thread Behaviour of parsed XML by dalgetty

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