From: yermej <yermej@...>
Date: 2007-11-27T02:15:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Removing duplicates and substrings from an array

On Nov 26, 9:15 am, Sam Larbi <sla...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Note:  parts of this message were removed by the gateway to make it a legal Usenet post.
>
> 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

This should work:

arr = ["Bob", "John", "Bobby", "John"]
arr.uniq!
arr.reject {|a| arr.any? {|b| b != a and b =~ /#{a}/}}

Jeremy