From: Sam Larbi <slarbi@...>
Date: 2007-11-27T00:15:12+09:00
Subject: Removing duplicates and substrings from an array

------=_Part_25147_28053732.1196090106613
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline

I've got an array of strings, say like:

["Bob", "John", "Bobby", "John"]

I want to remove duplicates and elements that are substrings of other
elements.  Therefore, the above array would become:

["John","Bobby"]

(order doesn't really matter to me, BTW)

Right now, this is what I'm doing:

def remove_duplicates_and_subsequences(some_array)
    result = []
    some_array.each_index do |i|
        (some_array.length-1).downto 0 do |j|
            some_array.delete_at(j) if i != j &&
some_array[i].index(some_array[j])
        end
    end
    return result
end

Is there a better way to do that?  I feel like I should be using select or
reject, but can't think of a way to do it.

Thanks,
Sammy Larbi

------=_Part_25147_28053732.1196090106613--