note
eyepopslikeamosquito
<P>
When dealing with duplicates in Perl, you should normally use a hash
(<I>perldoc -q duplicate</I>).
My solution (written before seeing [toolic]'s) is essentially the
same as his, though I
excluded the check for "M" since all your test data contains "M".
<CODE>
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my @array = ("M94202", "M94150", "M94297", "M94150", "M94161", "M94161", "M94162");
my %seen;
my $z = 1;
foreach my $item (@array) {
if (exists $seen{$item}) {
$item = $seen{$item};
}
else {
$seen{$item} = $z;
$item = $z;
$z += 2;
}
}
print Dumper \@array;
print "\n";
</CODE>
</P>
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