in reply to Re^2: Trying to print out only unique array values-
in thread Trying to print out only unique array values-

Close. There were a few issues with your updates. So, I think I covered those and commented the code enough to make it more understandable here: 
#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use List::MoreUtils qw(uniq);

my $char_at=10;   # Character to start grabbing data in the line
my $num_chars=50; # Number of characters to grab in the line
my @trnAccounts;  # our array to store results

# open our file
open my $fh, '<', $ARGV[0] or die "Could not open '$ARGV[0]' $!";

# go through our file, line by line
while (my $line = <$fh>) {
    chomp $line; # trim off trailing newline character first
    # OR, you could trim the line using regular expressions
    # $line =~ s/\A\s*//; # trim beginning
    # $line =~ s/\s*\z//; # trim end
    # OR, you could trim using Scalar::Util's trim or something
    # $line = trim($line);

    # skip this line completely if it doesn't contain the info we want
    next unless $line && length($line) >= $char_at;
    # grab the uppercased version of the first character in the line
    my $first_char = uc(substr($line,0,1) || '');
    # skip this line if that first character's an H or T
    next if ($first_char eq 'H' or $first_char eq 'T');
    # otherwise, push a portion of the line onto our array
    push @trnAccounts, substr($line, $char_at, $num_chars);
}

# get a unique list of info we stored.
my @unique_accounts = uniq(@trnAccounts);
# arrays are zero-based.
for my $i (0..$#unique_accounts) {
    # still zero-based, but display it as 1-based
    print $i+1, ":", $unique_accounts[$i], "\n";
}

# print out some totals
print "total: ", scalar(@trnAccounts), "\n";
print "uniq : ", scalar(@unique_accounts), "\n";

[download]
I hope that's more clear. Please speak up if something doesn't make sense. I apologize for not documenting the first attempt a bit more clearly.

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Re^4: Trying to print out only unique array values-
by rickman1 (Novice) on Aug 17, 2016 at 16:12 UTC

    Thank you very much genio!
    I didn't realize I had not initialized my $val variable properly. That if statement is no longer nonsense and does the trick. Now header and trailer records are ignored and not processed, thus my count is accurate. I will live with the fact that the unique values it finds are displayed in a 0 based count format, no big deal as it seems to be working like a charm. BTW, did you know that your user name (genio) in spanish means genius? I am guessing you do... lol. Here is the output of a much simpler file:
    0:123456789
    1:987654321
    2:123654874
    3:785471236
    4:951234569
    5:753698741
    6:478478478
    ============
    Total Records Processed: 10
    Total Unique Values Found : 7

    And here is the modified code: 

    use strict;
use warnings;
use List::MoreUtils qw(uniq);

my $char_at=10;
my $num_chars=50;
my $val;
my @trnAccounts;
#open my $fh, $ARGV[0]
#open my $fh, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', $ARGV[0]
open my $fh, '<:encoding(cp1252)', $ARGV[0]
    or die "Could not open '$ARGV[0]' $!";

while (my $line = <$fh>) {
    $val = substr($line, 0, 1);
    chomp $val;
    if ($val eq 'H' or $val eq 'T') {
        my $output = $line;
    }else {    
        chomp $line;
        next unless $line && length($line) >= $char_at;
        push @trnAccounts, substr($line, $char_at, $num_chars);
    }
}
my @unique_accounts = uniq(@trnAccounts);
print "\n";
for my $i (0..$#unique_accounts) {
    print $i, ":", $unique_accounts[$i], "\n";
}
print "============\n";
print "Total Records Processed: ", scalar(@trnAccounts), "\n";
print "Total Unique Values Found : ", scalar(@unique_accounts), "\n";

    [download]

    THANK YOU GENIO!

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