Happy January fellow Monks

I've written some code that works...but I don't like it!

Not only is it a bit messy, it also is probably not as efficient as it could be although it is only handle small amounts of data. But the main problem is that it uses Perl's smart match operator. I am using Perl 5.16.3 and smart match works well for what I want under this version. But I cannot guarantee it will always be using this version so don't want to stop it from being forward compatible.

Here's the bare bones of the code: 

my $query = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * FROM Sector, Lane_has_Sector WHERE
+ Sector_idSector = idSector AND Lane_wid = ? ORDER BY metric");
$query->execute($wid);
while (my $sec = $query->fetchrow_hashref) {
    #  More stuff happens here...
    ($sec->{'authority'}, my $prefix, my $suffix) = $dbh->selectrow_ar
+ray("SELECT name, prefix, suffix FROM Authority WHERE idAuthority = ?
+", undef, $sec->{'Authority_idAuthority'});
    $prefix = "$prefix " if $prefix;
    $suffix = " $suffix" if $suffix;
    push @authority, $prefix . $sec->{'authority'} . $suffix unless $p
+refix . $sec->{'authority'} . $suffix ~~ @authority;
}
my $auth_list = join '<br>', @authority;

[download]
Essentially I am pulling data from a database. Collecting together a some information into the @authority array but I only want unique values. This strikes me as the sort of thing databases are good at so I could hit the database again with another query that's quantified as DISTINCT and build my @authority array from that. But that seems messy as well. In the vast majority of cases, @authority will only hold one value but there are few times when it will hold two, perhaps three.

I'm thinking grep or List::Util might be a more elegant and robust solution here.

Any suggestions would be very welcome...

In reply to Alternative to smart match by Bod

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.