note moritz <blockquote><code> %entry = {$item_id=>\@data, $item_id=>\@data.....etc} </code></blockquote> <p>I hope that's not what you're doing, because that assigns a hash reference to a hash without dereferencing. <blockquote>As long as I give an explicit value for $j's range, the output is fine. But I cannot figure out how to access the arraysize for <c>$entry[$i]</c></blockquote> <code> my $len = scalar @{ $entry{$key}[$i] } </code> <p>gives you the length of the <c>$i</c> array stored at <c>$key</c>. <p>And I think you're missing the part of your code where you assign to <c>@entry</c>, I can't see how you'll get any output like this. <c>@entry = @{ $entry{$key} }</c> should fix it. <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-616540"> [http://perl6.org/|Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed] </div></div> 984147 984147