Win8 Strawberry 5.8.9.5 (32) Tue 07/26/2022 5:28:42 C:\@Work\Perl\monks >perl use strict; use warnings; my $s = "#tag2 #tag1 #tag2 #tag3 #tag1"; print qq{Orig: '$s' \n}; my %u; $s = join ' ', grep { ! $u{$_}++ } split /\s+/, $s; print qq{Uniq: '$s' \n}; printf qq{Dups: '%s' \n}, join ', ', sort grep { $u{$_} > 1 } keys %u; ^Z Orig: '#tag2 #tag1 #tag2 #tag3 #tag1' Uniq: '#tag2 #tag1 #tag3' Dups: '#tag1, #tag2'