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.

In reply to Re3: Add distinct elements to an array by dragonchild
in thread Add distinct elements to an array by cosmicsoup

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