What does this error mean: "Duplicate entry '273' for key 1"

[Daniel R. Anderson]

I got the following error on a perl script:

"Duplicate entry '273' for key 1"

I googled for it and found a thread telling me to DROP the table and re 
CREATE it.  So I did, and my script is working fine.  My question: why 
did this happen, why did dropping and recreating work, and what can I do 
in the future if this happens and I've got things in my database I don't 
want to DROP?

Thanks in advance,

Dan

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