Your problem is almost fixed, except that you called the second printit() before you assigned $reports to the new hash table. So your second printit() is still printing the old hash table.

Change your code to:

# save the file
$reports = \%reports ;
printit();
[download]

And you will print your second hash table correctly.

If $reports{$year} and $reports->{$year} are different variables, and $reports->{$year} is a hash reference, then what is $reports{$year}?

This is because $reports is a reference that points to the %reports hash table. The %reports hash table gets created after your first printit(). In your original code, in your first printit(), you tried to refer to the loaded $reports to get your year values, and then refer to undefined %reports with $reports{$year}, which has not yet been initialized. Because you haven't used strict at the beginning of your code, Perl happily created the undefined variable for you.

Cheers. Roger.