It took me a while but I tracked down the cause of your ugly symbol (FS or ^\) I dont think to many people use this one but from perldoc perlvar:

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$SUBSCRIPT_SEPARATOR
$SUBSEP
$;

The subscript separator for multidimensional array emulation. If you refer to a hash element as
$foo{$a,$b,$c}
it really means
$foo{join($;, $a, $b, $c)}
But don't put
@foo{$a,$b,$c}      # a slice--note the @
which means
($foo{$a},$foo{$b},$foo{$c})
Default is ``\034'', the same as SUBSEP in awk. If your keys contain binary data there might not be any safe value for $;. (Mnemonic: comma (the syntactic subscript separator) is a semi-semicolon. Yeah, I know, it's pretty lame, but $, is already taken for something more important.)

Consider using ``real'' multidimensional arrays as described in the perllol manpage.
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So you could set $; to something that isnt so 'ugly' or more intelligently use a two level hash, often called a HOH like so:

use Data::Dumper;
my (%Sales,%Years);
#....
++$Sales{$sale_name}->{$fy}; # fy = Fiscal Year
# and/or
++$Years{$fy}->{$sale_name}; # fy = Fiscal Year
#....
print Dumper(\%Sales,\%Years); # _very_ usefull tool.

# Less useful, but more obvious than messing with $;
++$count->{"$sale_name : $fy"}; # fy = Fiscal Year
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Reversing the relationship or using both can also be useful. Of course putting them together into titles involves an extra loop but ultimately I'd say this is the way to go.

HTH

Yves / DeMerphq
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