From: Lionel Bouton <lionel-subscription@...>
Date: 2007-11-27T02:20:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Removing duplicates and substrings from an array

yermej wrote the following on 26.11.2007 18:15 :
> 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"]
> This should work:
>
> arr = ["Bob", "John", "Bobby", "John"]
> arr.uniq!
> arr.reject {|a| arr.any? {|b| b != a and b =~ /#{a}/}}
>   

You'll have surprises if there's a "." element...

arr = ["Bob", "John", "Bobby", "John"]
arr.uniq!
arr.reject {|a| arr.any? {|b| b != a and a.index(b) } }


seems safer and quicker to me.

Lionel