How to dereference hash references

Question

UPDATE: Everything I know about referencing/dereferencing came from here: http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/06/perl-array-reference-examples/

I\'m working with a library

Answer 1

my $hash_ref = @{$result};

is the same as

my @array = @{$result};
my $hash_ref = @array;

This forces the array to be evaluated in scalar context by the assignment operator, which causes it to evaluate as the number of items in the array, or 1.