> and then flatten it when you don't want it to appear with subhashes
I do not need it flattened for anything that I'm doing. I'm retrieving items from the environment, which is itself a flat namepace. And treating it like a flat hash is the easiest thing to do, as you alluded to in the comment above:
> I would assume that you want just a flattened hash for reading the ENV?
Since my input is essentially a flattened hash, and my output is a nested hash. I can either loop over a flattened hash and build the output structure as needed or I could _recursively_ loop over a nested data structure and pull them directly into it, but recursively looping seemed like more work than just looping.