2009/11/4 Jesù¸ Gabriel y GaláÏ <jgabrielygalan / gmail.com>: > 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 nd be left with ["A", "B", "D", "C"] only. > > 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 :-) Done. :-) robert -- remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/