From: Christian von Kleist <cvonkleist@...>
Date: 2007-11-27T00:27:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Removing duplicates and substrings from an array

On Nov 26, 2007 10:15 AM, Sam Larbi <slarbi@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>


You can use Array.uniq to remove duplicates.  For removing words that
are contained in other words, I would sort the array, then for each
string in the array:

good_strings = []
0.upto(good_strings.length - 2) do |i|
  good_strings << strings[i] unless strings[i + 1].include?(strings[i])
end

...or something like that.