If you have all diagnoses in arrays you could do the following:

use strict;
use warnings;

my %diags = ( "Meningitis" => \@array,
          "Encephalitis" => \@Encephalitis_77,
          # more of them here
        );

my $Search = qw( 6280 );

my $found_one = 0;
for my $diag ( keys %diags ) {
  if( my @found = grep { $_ eq $Search } @{$diags{$diag}} ) {
    my $found = join ",", @found;
    print "Primary diagnosis: $diag, $found\n";
    $found_one = 1;
  }
}
print "Sorry, \"$Search\" not found in diagnosis list\n" unless $found
+_one;
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Disclaimer: have not run this due to lack of sample data, so there might be errors in there. But the concept should be clear.

Update: changed @$diag to @{$diags{$diag}}.

Ok, thank you so much for responding!!Your code works wonderfully. The only other thing is that I need to search multiple items (so instead of $Search, perahaps @Search or it could read from a formatted CSV file) and then I need perl to pick the one that shows up the most as the primary, but still display the other ones. If the results could display something like:

Primary diagnosis (code that showed up the most for the particular per
+son): Cancer of the throat (7)
Other diagnosis: Benign Neoplasm (3 - as in it showed up three times) 
+Leukemias (2)
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I probably didn't make that very clear sorry, and I may be getting greedy here, but any help would be so appreciated!

Do you have any ideas for that? THANK YOU

Put another loop around the loop over the diagnoses:

my @Search = qw( 6280 3141 2718 1414 );
my %frequency;
for my $Search (@Search) {
  for my $diag ( keys %diags ) {
    if( my @found = grep { $_ eq $Search } @{$diags{$diag}} ) {
      my $found = join ",", @found;
      print "Primary diagnosis: $diag, $found\n";
      $frequency{$Search}++;
    }
  }
}
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and then do something based on the %frequency of found diagnoses.

Super Search and or Google will help you learn about use and uses.

G'day Raya4505,

Welcome to the monastery.

Firstly, I'm unsure on a couple of things so I've assumed: @array and @Encephalitis_77 are two different sources that you want to search; and, @found contains related information beyond the "Primary Diagnosis". You'll probably need to make changes to the example code below; however, the basic technique should be valid.

If you organise your data into a hash with a structure like this:

code1 => {
    source1 => {
        primary => 'diagnosis',
        other   => 'information',
    },
    source2 ...
},
code2 ...
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You can write a short subroutine to quickly search for the information you want. The basic technique (with a couple of example searches) are shown in this script:

#!/usr/bin/env perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;

my %data_for = (
    6280 => {
        array => {
            primary => 'Meningitis',
            other => 'Other relevant info ...',
        },
        Encephalitis_77 => {
            primary => 'Encephalitis',
            other => 'Other relevant info ...',
        },
    },
);

search_for_diagnosis_code($_) for (6280, 9999);

sub search_for_diagnosis_code {
    my ($search) = @_;

    print "Searching for '$search' ...";

    if (exists $data_for{$search}) {
        for my $source (keys %{$data_for{$search}}) {
            print "\tFound in '$source':";
            print "\t\tPrimary Diagnosis: $data_for{$search}{$source}{
+primary}";
            print "\t\tOther Information: $data_for{$search}{$source}{
+other}";
        }
    }
    else {
        print "\tNo data found.";
    } 
}
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Output:

Searching for '6280' ...
    Found in 'array':
        Primary Diagnosis: Meningitis
        Other Information: Other relevant info ...
    Found in 'Encephalitis_77':
        Primary Diagnosis: Encephalitis
        Other Information: Other relevant info ...
Searching for '9999' ...
    No data found.
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An SQLite3 DB is a single file, easy to set up, and pretty darn fast for small data sets
like you seem to be talking about. Once set up, you can use Perl to provide the front end
for adding, deleting and searching for record matches. It is not that Perl is a
poor solution for this, just not the best one from my point of view...

Just a thought...and best of luck with whatever you do!