thanks c-era here's the one that we came up with for creating the array: 
while(<>) {
   @parts = ($_ =~ /.{3}/g);
   $assign = "\$hash" . join('', map { "{\'$_\'}" } @parts) . "++;";
   eval $assign;
}

[download]
Not as fast as I'd like, but I guess it's doing a lot of work...

In reply to Re: varying length multi-dimensional hashes by joe
in thread varying length multi-dimensional hashes by joe

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