I am new to php and sql so apologise for not being very clear.

I am doing a Multiple Answer Survey where people can select 3 of there "best" friends.

I have all the friends name in a MySQL table.

I want people to be able to select from a very long list of names so I have implemented autocomplete.

The issue is that I don't want them to put the same name twice.

Ideally I want the selected name not to appear on the list when typing on the next textareas.

I came across this which does the job I want:

http://jsfiddle.net/jakecigar/gupuufqc/1/

The only problem is that the source of my availableTags is not a list of options, but it is another php page doing a sql query to get all the names in a table and create a JSon array (using json_encode($return_arr))

Any idea how to implement such a thing?

All the best

Eliott