use strict; use warnings; use diagnostics; use Data::Dumper; my %hash; my $key; my $value; my @data = ("foo",1, "bar",2, "foo",3, "baz",4); while ($key = shift (@data)) { $value = shift (@data); # push the value on the array push @{$hash{$key}}, $value; } print Dumper \%hash;