No. Your data is held in the database, you will need to connect to and query the database to find out what is in it. So this appears very much to be a mySQL question, not Perl.

To get it back to Perl, perhaps you could have a button (on the page where you add new people) that fetches the names and email address of those currently in the database. You could put these in nice table tags (and hidden tags) and check against them in the target perl script, using CGI, before doing your database connection.

But, as stated in previous replies, the mySQL homepage is an adequate place to learn about the PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE attributes available in mySQL.

To be honest, if what you really want is exactly (and no more than) what you described in your question, I might consider PHP. But don't tell anyone that I said that!

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