in reply to Mystery character in hash key name

$TotalMatchesHash{$F,$BBEL,$AR,$VL} = $MatchCount;

This just concatenates the four variables and uses the result as a hash key. If they are all integers, you can't retrieve the previous values from that hash key unless you happen to know their lengths.

Update: That was actually wrong; see the other replies.

I strongly recommend to dump your hash like this:

use Data::Dumper; $Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1; ... print Dumper \%NewRFactorAverageHash;

This will escape non-printable characters in a meaningful way.

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