rsiedl,
In Perl, we have the motto "There Is More Than One Way To Do It". Variations of this particular problem come so often, that there are lots of solutions. Converting to a hash is a great solution if you consider a few points:

• I will need to verify multiple values
• The array won't change between checks
• I only need to know if the value appears once
• Duplicating the array as a hash will not be a memory concern

If one or more of these requirements do not fit your situation, then grep is a great alternative. By nature it processes the entire list even if a match was found on the first item - this allows you to determine how many times an item appears in the array. It is also relatively fast since it is a built-it function.

The third choice that I am presenting is actually my favorite. List::Util has first which will return true on first match or undef if the item is not found in the list. It allows you to pass a code reference as the argument which allows you to provide a regex, an exact match, or some custom Frankestein monster as the determining agent.

Cheers - L~R