thanks for all your great advice and wisdom...here is the somewhat finished code. I dont know what use strict is but I could not get the script to run correctly with it. I am sure it is a problem on my end and it is good advice...

I was suppossed to write a subroutine to process the arrays and hashes but I just ended up inserting the foreach loop to do that...not sure how to turn that section into a subroutine with global variables??

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

#cash register and print receipt program

my (@items, %qty, %price);

#User input here

print "Please enter your first and last name\n";
chomp (my $name = <STDIN>);

print "Please enter your state sales tax in percentage (i.e. 7.75)\n";
chomp (my $tax = <STDIN>);
$taxrate = $tax / 100;

# enter loop to capture customer information here

my $continue='Y';
while ($continue eq 'Y'){
print "Please enter an item or product name\n";
chomp ($itemname = <STDIN>);
push @item, $itemname;

print "Please enter the quantity of the item\n";
chomp ($itemquantity  = <STDIN>);
$qty{$itemname} = $itemquantity;

print "Please enter the price of the item (no \$ please)\n";
chomp ($itemprice = <STDIN>);
$price{$itemname} = $itemprice;

print "Would you like to add another item? - Y or N\n";
chomp ($continue = <STDIN>);

}

# process subtotal and print receipt output  here

foreach $item (@item) {
        print "Item: $item\n";

        $q_item = $qty{$item};
        print "Quantity: $qty{$item}\n";

        $p_item = $price{$item};
        print "Price: \$$price{$item}\n";

        $itemtotal = $q_item * $p_item;
        print "Item total: \$$itemtotal\n";

        $subtotal += $itemtotal;
        print "Your current subtotal is: \$$subtotal\n";
}

#print totals and tax here

print "Purchase Subtotal: $subtotal\n";

print "Sales Tax Rate: $tax\n";

my $totaltax = $subtotal * $taxrate;
print "Total Sales Tax = \$$totaltax\n";

my $totalamount = $subtotal + $totaltax;
print "The total amount of this sale is: \$$totalamount\n";

#print the customer name and current date and time

print "\n";
print "Customer: $name\n";

print "\n";
my $now = localtime time;
print "Current Date and Time: $now\n";
[download]

also I tried an "if" statement to test the $continue variable for the proper answer but I could not get that to loop until the right answer "Y" or "N" was given so I took that bad code out

I can't tell you how much I appreciate your advice - I am learning slowly!

sierra

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