Ok, lets have a look at your sub, first Build_Country_List. First do yourself a favor and use strict and warnings. You have one variable, $condition that I cant really see what does. Anyway, the sub seems to take 2 arguments, a boolean which is supposed to say if this is the first time the function is called, and a string that is to be inserted into the list if the country is not allready there.

The list seems to be some sort of global variable, so Ill keep it like that. usually not a good idea though, but for a throwaway script....

There are also lots of prints there, which I guess are debug statements. If so, I allways do something like this at the start of the module:

sub debug{
   print @_;
}
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There are actually 2 different ways I would have implemented your first sub, depending on requirements(speed vs memory usage):

This one uses some extra memory, but should be faster:

my %__privateIndexHash; #key = country read, value is allways 1
my @CountryList;
sub Build_Country_List($){
   #I do not really care about the boolean, Ill figure this out for my
+self.
   my $country=shift;
   if(!exists $__privateIndexHash{$country}){
   #Havent seen country before, insert into array and hash index
       $__privateIndexHash{country}=1;
       push @CountryList, $country;
   }
}
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my @CountryList;
Build_Country_List($){
   my $country=shift;
   push @CountryList, $country unless grep { $_ eq $country} @CountryL
+ist;
}
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Update Ok, here is a stab at the seond function. I have moved a little around on the if/else's and removed the foreach. Does this still do what you mean? I assume that $total is some sort of global variable.

my $total;
sub Build_totals_shares_for_sedol_Sell_side($$$) {
  my $sedol = shift;
  my $shares = shift;
  my $mySellfirstflag = shift;
  if ($mySellfirstflag eq "YES") {
    %Sellhash = ($sedol => $shares); 
    #Do you mean that with mySellfirst that we should replace the shar
+es,
    #If so, the above line should be $Sellhash{$sedol}=$shares.
    #As it stands now, we replace the entire hash!!
    print "Sell: The $sedol has traded\n$share\n";
  } else {
    if (exists $Sellhash{$sedol}) {
      print "the sedol is in the list so add the shares.\n";
      $Sellhash{"$sedol"} += $shares;
      my $newtotal = $Sellhash{"$sedol"};
      print "the new total shares for sedol: $sedol is $newtotal\n";
    } else {
      $Sellhash{$sedol} = $shares; #You did a .= here was that a typo?
      print "the new entry is $sedol $shares\n";  
    } 
    $total=0;
    $total += $_ foreach values %Sellhash;
  }
}
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GoldClaw

GoldClaw:
Thank you for your help.

I will clairify a bit but it looks like grep and map will help me.

What I do is this:
I have a list of trades in a tab seperated file.
The first and second line of the file looks like:
Date Sedol A/C # Country Currency B/S Shares Price (local) Cust Comm Rate Gross Comm (local) PNL (local) fx rate Gross PNL (USD) PNL (USD) tkts
07/04/01 6777007 1022578221 ZA ZAR S 10000 69.900000000 30.00 2097.00 1258.20 8.00 262.09 157.26 1.00

I need to calculate the profit and loss (PnL) from these trades.
The output needs to be things like:
1. a line for each client with the totals of each of the columns in the input file and some others which need to caluated. Client totals.
2. Total PnL for every client for a given country. Client vs country table with PnL totals as entries. this table is for a given date.
Process:
1. Based on the date range (user input) I collect all of the input files, cat them togeter into one.
2. open the file and line by line (trade by trade) I build the lists up. Client List, Country list, Total shares for a given Sedol list. (this is as far as I have gotten)(first perl application) :)
3. Now I want to put all of these trades in a big hash of arrays and say for all the countries in the traded country list build me a hash of arrays that countain trades done in those countries. (This is why there can not be two of the same countires listed.)
I want to pass this hash of arrays to the same function with the client list and have it return a hash of arrays for each client.
The I want to pass this hash of arrays to my PnL function and have it return the same hash of arrays with some new elements which are the things I need to print out to a file. PnL Costs charges etc....


This was the idea.

I wanted the country list, client list and total shares by sedol (this is the number form of a ticker) (actually I need to add date on to the array in the sedol total share function for each sedol total share array) to be global since I will need the for a lot of things.

The first sub ... build country list I think you understand and I see what you are doing. I thought that I would have to initialize the array by putting in one element the first time it was called. You are building a hash table with keys as the country and then just asking if if the country is allready in there and if not pushing it into an array.
Thanks!

The second sub it trying to do the same basic thing ... as I am reading in lines from the input file I want to build a structure, a hash of arrays, that contains the sedol the date of the that trade (which I can pass in as $date), and the total number of shares traded for that sedol. I need this later to caculate PnL for a given day. This was my first attempt at a hash.

IN reference to the code below:
The condition $mySellfirstflag is again trying to initialize the hash for the first time the sub is called. Same basic structure as the build client list.
I am trying to use the sedol as the key so that later I can find the total number of shares traded for a given date based on that sedol.

  if ($mySellfirstflag eq "YES") {
    %Sellhash = ($sedol => $shares); 
    #Do you mean that with mySellfirst that we should replace the shar
+es,
    #If so, the above line should be $Sellhash{$sedol}=$shares.
    #As it stands now, we replace the entire hash!!
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Again in reference to the code below:
I thought that is how you assign the value to a given key???

      $Sellhash{$sedol} = $shares; #You did a .= here was that a typo?
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Any thoughts?


Chris:
Is your @really_big_array an array of hashes? or what is this syntax? ... does smaller_array get filled with a list of fruits which point to apples?

my @really_big_array = ({fruit=>apple},{vegitable=>'lettuce'},{fruit=>
+'oranges'},{vegitable=>'carrot'});

# put all entries with a 'fruit' key in a new array
my @smaller_array = ();
foreach(@really_big_array) {
    push(@smaller_array,$_) if($_->{fruit} ne "");
}
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If you didn't want to do it by key you could test the value of the key against something, my example if you wanted all the apples (say you have another key for type). You could do:

Hope that helps, Reply if it doesn't make sense
Chris