deleteDups()

[J. Landman Gay]

HyperChris at aol.com wrote:
> I used to use an Xcmd set called HyperExternals Pro and one of its useful 
> XFCN's was deleteDups(). The main thing it did was to quickly eliminate the 
> duplicate lines in a sorted list. Here is my transcript replacement ...
>  function deleteDups pList
>   repeat with x=number of lines in pList down to 2
>      if line x of pList is line (x-1) of pList then delete line x of pList
>    end repeat
>   return pList
>  end deleteDups
>  ... but I thought it might be fun to see what others have to offer up that 
> would be more elegant and clever! Anyone?

If you don't care what the final order is, I like this one. It takes 
advantage of the fact that the "split" command doesn't allow duplicates 
and is very fast:

function deleteDups pList
   split pList by cr and numToChar(3)
   return keys(pList)
end deleteDups

I use numToChar(3) -- which is the "enter" key -- becaue it is 
untypeable and therefore unlikely to be in the data. You could use any 
character you know isn't in the list.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com