Sorry for asking what might look like a dumb question to an expert, but my Perl skills are still limited.

:) My intent was not to admonish, I was interested to know your search terms (you should share them if you searched) as this topic can be hard to find.

I tried a bunch variations, I even resorted to ?node_id=3989;BIT=benchmark%20hash%7B, closest I found was Array to Hash, Using map to create a hash/bag from an array -- not your case exactly, but seems to cover all available syntax -- you could adapt it