Question

Suppose an Excel sheet has a column named Student Names and the column has duplicate values. Say,

Student
=======

Arup
John
Mike
John
Lisa
Arup

Using VBScript, how can I get unique values as below?

Arup
John
Lisa
Mike

Answer 1

The VBScript tool for getting unique items is a dictionary: add all the items as keys to a dictionary and dictionary.Keys() will return an array of the – per definitionem – unique keys. In code:

  Dim aStudents : aStudents = Array("Arup", "John", "Mike", "John", "Lisa", "Arup")
  WScript.Echo Join(aStudents)
  Dim aUniqStudents : aUniqStudents = uniqFE(aStudents)
  WScript.Echo Join(aUniqStudents)

' returns an array of the unique items in for-each-able collection fex
Function uniqFE(fex)
  Dim dicTemp : Set dicTemp = CreateObject("Scripting.Dictionary")
  Dim xItem
  For Each xItem In fex
      dicTemp(xItem) = 0
  Next
  uniqFE = dicTemp.Keys()
End Function

output:

Arup John Mike John Lisa Arup
Arup John Mike Lisa