in reply to Array Hash

You could find that out easily by printing the contents of hash %count (use Data::Dumper for that, see my additions to your script). If that isn't enough you could then change your test data and observe what is changed in the output

use Data::Dumper; @arr=qw(19205134 18630215 18453487 18416242 18338715 18227590 17698645 +); @arr1=qw(18227590 18053561 17698645 16966777); foreach $e (@arr, @arr1) { $count{$e}++ } print Dumper(\%count);