Dear Monks,
I have a task which has as follows:
Make a subroutine that removes duplicates from a list. If the list is +passed as an array, then return a clean list. If the list is passed a +s a reference to an array then clean the given array in place.

My problem is that I have these two sub-routines, one for each case:
sub clean_list { my @array_with_duplicates=(@_); my @array_no_duplicates; my $previous = ''; while (scalar @array_with_duplicates > 0) { my $next = shift(@array_with_duplicates); if ($previous ne $next) { push(@array_no_duplicates, $next); $previous = $next; } }

that would work on a code like this (case 1):
open(IN, '<', 'myfile') or die "Could not read file\n"; my @array_with_duplicates = <IN>; close IN; @array_with_duplicates = sort @array_with_duplicates; clean_list(@array_with_duplicates); open(OUT, ">", "myfile.NO_DUPLICATES") or die "Could not create file\n +"; print OUT @array_no_duplicates; close OUT;
and
sub clean_array { my %hash; @hash{@{$_[0]}}=(); @{$_[0]}=keys %hash; }

that would work on a code like this (case 2):
open(IN, '<', 'myfile') or die "Could not read file\n"; my @initial_array = <IN>; close IN; clean_array(\@initial_array); open(OUT, ">", "myfile.NO_DUPLICATES") or die "Could not create file\n +"; print OUT @initial_array; close OUT;

Can you help me create 1 script that can handle both cases?

In reply to How to combine these 2 subroutines in one? by Anonymous Monk

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