Hey there, perl monks blessed with wisdom from the HTML::Tree of knowledge. I'm having some trubbs with something. Some code, to be slightly more specific. I need to remove duplicates from an array. Easy you might say, and it's in the FAQs. However, after struggling with that solution for what seems like an age, I finally see the problem (and this is gonna sound really stupid). I'm not actually sorting a real array of elements, I'm sorting an array of hashes. Each containing two keys. Let us call them 'bob' and 'alice'. The array would look like this: 
@array = [{bob => 'value1', alice => 'value2'}, {bob => 'othervalue1',
+ alice => 'othervalue2'}];    # and so on for loads of elements...

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Obviously this wouldn't be very useful, but the hashes contain *swishes hands* top secret data. (Not really top secret; I just prefer to remain mysterious). So when I'm removing duplicates from this array, here's the crux of the matter. I need to remove the whole hash if only the 'bob' field is a duplicate, regardless of whether the 'alice' field is also a duplicate. So: 
$hash = {bob => 'I am a value', alice => 'You're not a value.'};
$hash2 = {bob => 'I am a value', alice => 'You bloody well aren't a va
+lue!'}

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The second hash would be considered a duplicate of the first, the two bob fields being equal, and removed. Anyone up for suggesting how to do this? I'm pretty stumped.

--
my @words = grep({ref} @clever);
sub version { print "I cuss your capitalist pig tendencies bad!\n" }

In reply to Removing duplicate hashes based on only one key by Amoe

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