I have a text file that I'm feeding into a perl script and need a look up table to check the text file and see whether a particular value is something 'new'. If 'new' the value is added to a hash table and a counter goes up by one. 
if(!$data{$match})                                                    
+                         
       {
        $data{$match}++;
        $count = $count + 1;
     }

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It works fine for the most part but i sometimes get an error: 
Odd number of elements in hash assignment at ...

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What does this mean and how might i take steps to correct it? Also, is it necessarily something 'bad' or can I - in an emergency - safely ignore it? Thanks

In reply to Odd number of elements error by Angharad

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