What you are talking about is very similar to the question, "PerlFAQ 4: How can I remove duplicate elements from a list or array?," which I think suggests methods you may wish to look into.

(Personally, I tend toward:

{
  my (%names);
  foreach (@Person) {
    $names{$_}++; 
  }
  @Person = keys(%names);
}
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Cheers - L~R

my @source = qw(bob janne max max bob anne);
my @finalnames;

foreach $name (@source) {
   next if(grep(/^$name$/, @finalnames));
   push @finalnames, $name;
}
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my @source = qw(bob janne max max bob anne);
my %temphash;
my @finalnames;

foreach $name (@source) {
   $temphash{$name} = 1;
}

@finalnames = (keys %temphash);
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Thank you Monks. The first reply actually handled my problem well. But an explanation is warranted, especially since it may well give me insight on bettering my code.

I am reading in data from a sybase server. Each record has an id_num, persons, and many other fields (20). Unfortunately, the way the data is captured in the database, persons are listed in a varchar(255) field by their first name and coma seperated:

3255|bob,mary,sally,tom|2003-10-22|0|1|2003-07-01| ...

I'm need to keep each record complete by its id_num and all other fields, but I need to do various tasks based on the persons contained in each record. One of the tasks is to produce a cgi drop down list box form that would list each person. Selecting that person would then show each project they are tasked with.

I am reading in the line and creating an array of that field by splitting on the coma's. But again, each record has multiple persons (up to five).

Thanks Again,
Louis

It sounds like you need a hash with the key being the person's name and the value being an array reference containing the idnum of each project associated with that person.

Of course, I would strongly recommend having the person who owns the database normalize their data. You would need a project table, a person table, and another table that associates the two. That would make your life a lot easier. (And, it would make your web app a lot faster, as you wouldn't have to re-normalize the data every time.)

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

... strings and arrays will suffice. As they are easily available as native data types in any sane language, ... - blokhead, speaking on evolutionary algorithms

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.