Deduplicating fields of information where there are multiple occurrences of a value in a single field, maybe separated by a single character can be achieved in a variety of ways. This solution uses array:union() and split create a unique array and then split the content out to a unique list.

For example, when examining the humio and looking for the browsers or user agents that have used your instance, the UserAgent data will contain the browser and toolkits used to support them, for example:

The actual names are the Name/Version pairs showing compatibility with different browser standards. Resolving this into a simplified list requires splitting up the list, simplifying (to remove duplicates), filtering, and then summarizing the final list.

The resulting output from the query is a list of events with each event containing a matching _index and browser. This can be useful if you want to perform further processing on a list of events rather than an array of values.

Arrays are handy when you want to work with multiple values of the same data type. The array:union() function is used to find distinct values of an array over multiple events. One important feature of UNION is, that it removes duplicate rows from the combined data meaning if there are repetitions, then only one element occurrence should be in the union.

Example incoming data might look like this:

The query is used to search for and eliminate duplicates of e-mail addresses in arrays/combined datasets.

Sample output from the incoming example data: