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in reply to How do you check if a key exists without creating it ?

You're just falling into autovivification. Check for existence of the lower level first if you don't want it autocreated:

use Data::Dumper; $x = {}; 1 if ( $x->{Y} && exists $x->{Y}{X} ) ; 1 if ( $x->{Z} && defined $x->{Z}{A} ); print Dumper $x;