Yeah, uniqueness constraints are proper going in, but somehow this has escaped me in my SELECT statement all this time that I've been using the code. I've read the DBI book by O'Reilly a number of times as well as several PostgreSQL books - but it had never occurred to me that there was an alternative to using ~* and ~~* to achieve what I was doing.

Thank you (Zaxo and blokhead) for taking the time to answer my relatively idiotic question. :)