On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 11:49 AM, George George
<george.githinji / gmail.com> wrote:
> Given an array of arrays for example
> [["A", "B"], ["A", "B", "D", "C"], ["B", "D"], ["B", "C", "F", "E"],
> ["C", "F"], ["C", "E"], ["G"]]
>
> what would be a nice way of "merging" the items that seem to already be
> contained in another array. e.g.
> ["A","B"] and ["B", "D"] are subsets of ["A", "B", "D", "C"] I would
> like to drop the subsets  ¨Âîä âå ìåæô ÷éôè Û¢Á¢¢Â¢¬ ¢Ä¢¬ ¢Ã¢Ý ïîìù
This is one way:

irb(main):025:0> a = [["A", "B"], ["A", "B", "D", "C"], ["B", "D"],
["B", "C", "F", "E"],["C", "F"], ["C", "E"], ["G"]]
=> [["A", "B"], ["A", "B", "D", "C"], ["B", "D"], ["B", "C", "F",
"E"], ["C", "F"], ["C", "E"], ["G"]]
irb(main):026:0> a.delete_if {|x| a.any? {|y| (x != y) && ((x&y).size
== x.size)}}
=> [["A", "B", "D", "C"], ["B", "C", "F", "E"], ["G"]]

Maybe there would be a way to optimize this sorting by size and
checking smaller ones against bigger ones only.
Left as an excercise for the reader :-)

Jesus.