simple question

i have a data set of stock orders and i want to count the number of unique stock symbols in the set.  

i have turned the data set into an array and based on the message spec, i can identify the stock symbols.  but i don't know how to make sure i'm only counting unique ones.

i had thought to do an if statement along the lines of 


$symbolset = "@symbolset";
if $symbolset !~ /substr($message,17,6)/  #if the array doesn't contain the new symbol
{
#then add it to the array
push (@symbolset, "substr($message,17,6)

}

substr($message,17,6) is the symbol info within each line of the array of the data set.

the problem is that that doesn't work!

does anyone have any ideas how to do this?

• simple question by Alex Goor
• Re: simple question by Li, Jialin
• Re: simple question by John W. Krahn
• Re: simple question by Richard Lee