For focused advice you need to give us the bigger picture. If the search is occasional or the array is small (supply your own definition for both those) then grep is the tool of choice. If you don't care about the original order of the data and the data set is of modest size (again supply your own definition) then a hash of arrays may be appropriate. If the data size is modest (ditto) but you need order information add an ordinal along with the data value for each item (see below). If the data is large, use a database.

For the penultimate option consider:

use strict; use warnings; my $entries = 0; my %data; while (<DATA>) { chomp; my ($name, $value) = split ' ', $_, 2; push @{$data{$name}}, [$entries++, $value]; } for my $name (sort keys %data) { print "$name\n"; print " $_->[1]\n" for sort {$a->[0] <=> $b->[0]} @{$data{$name} +}; } __DATA__ Jim 12 John 15 Peter 08 Andrew 34 Jim 57 Andreas 27

Prints:

Andreas 27 Andrew 34 Jim 12 57 John 15 Peter 08

Perl is environmentally friendly - it saves trees

In reply to Re: check if an element exists in array by GrandFather
in thread check if an element exists in array by Anonymous Monk

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