thanks for the info brian_d_foy. however after taking your advice and making my scalar a lexical i am still unable to re-use my hash each time loop through my foreach $uniqu ... statement. i also took the advice given by isotope and Scarborough and made my counter look like $hash{$rule}++ and also tried to use the  undef %hash; at the end of my loop, but still with no luck. here is what my loop looks like now:

foreach $uniqu (@uniqu){
  my %hash;
  ...(process each key/value)...
  undef %hash;
}
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it still seems as though every time i go through my foreach loop, the clearing of my %hash is not taking place. any other suggestions?