Re^2: (another) HoH question

[muba]

"a hash cannot have duplicate keys". If a hash could look like this: (...snip...) ...how would perl know what value to return when you said, "Give me the value associated with the key '456'?

True. But a hash value can be an array ref, so in a way you can associate multiple values to a single key. Which, I think, is what is needed here.