It's not that I'm trying to turn an arrayref into a hash, I'm trying to take a function that is supposed to return an array of hashes and get the data out of the hashes. Sorry if I wasn't as clear as I could be. (perldsc calls this a "list of hashes", which I thought would be the same thing. Maybe not?)

It may well be the same thing as a nested data structure, and it's quite likely that I don't understand it yet. Happens to me a lot - that's why I have a shelf full of O'Reilly books!