FAQ 4.41 How can I remove duplicate elements from a list or array?
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From: PerlFAQ Server on 29 May 2010 00:00 This is an excerpt from the latest version perlfaq4.pod, which comes with the standard Perl distribution. These postings aim to reduce the number of repeated questions as well as allow the community to review and update the answers. The latest version of the complete perlfaq is at http://faq.perl.org . -------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.41: How can I remove duplicate elements from a list or array? (contributed by brian d foy) Use a hash. When you think the words "unique" or "duplicated", think "hash keys". If you don't care about the order of the elements, you could just create the hash then extract the keys. It's not important how you create that hash: just that you use "keys" to get the unique elements. my %hash = map { $_, 1 } @array; # or a hash slice: @hash{ @array } = (); # or a foreach: $hash{$_} = 1 foreach ( @array ); my @unique = keys %hash; If you want to use a module, try the "uniq" function from "List::MoreUtils". In list context it returns the unique elements, preserving their order in the list. In scalar context, it returns the number of unique elements. use List::MoreUtils qw(uniq); my @unique = uniq( 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 5, 7 ); # 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 my $unique = uniq( 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 5, 7 ); # 7 You can also go through each element and skip the ones you've seen before. Use a hash to keep track. The first time the loop sees an element, that element has no key in %Seen. The "next" statement creates the key and immediately uses its value, which is "undef", so the loop continues to the "push" and increments the value for that key. The next time the loop sees that same element, its key exists in the hash *and* the value for that key is true (since it's not 0 or "undef"), so the next skips that iteration and the loop goes to the next element. my @unique = (); my %seen = (); foreach my $elem ( @array ) { next if $seen{ $elem }++; push @unique, $elem; } You can write this more briefly using a grep, which does the same thing. my %seen = (); my @unique = grep { ! $seen{ $_ }++ } @array; -------------------------------------------------------------------- The perlfaq-workers, a group of volunteers, maintain the perlfaq. They are not necessarily experts in every domain where Perl might show up, so please include as much information as possible and relevant in any corrections. The perlfaq-workers also don't have access to every operating system or platform, so please include relevant details for corrections to examples that do not work on particular platforms. Working code is greatly appreciated. If you'd like to help maintain the perlfaq, see the details in perlfaq.pod. |