I have an array that contains over 1 million strings of varying sizes from 10 characters to 250 characters. Each string is a set of two or more values separated by pipes ("|"). I need to eliminate any strings that are substrings of other strings within the array. For example, if the array contains ("A|B|C", "A|B|C|D|E"), then "A|B|C" should be dropped and "A|B|C|D|E" should be kept. I tried using "any" from List::MoreUtils, but it either kept everything or removed everything. Nothing I tried within the BLOCK worked: push(@arrCompletedChains, $strChain) if any { index($_, $strChain) < 0 } @arrWorkingCompletedChains;

Here is the code I am currently using, but it takes an extremely long time to run:

for my $strChain (@arrWorkingCompletedChains)
  {
    my $found = false;
    foreach (@arrWorkingCompletedChains)
    {
      if ($strChain ne $_ && index($_, $strChain) >= 0)
      {
        $found = true;
        last;
      }
    }
    if (!$found)
    {
      push(@arrCompletedChains, $strChain);
    }
  }

[download]

Any suggestions on how to improve the speed of this code would be greatly appreciated.

In reply to Best method to eliminate substrings from array by catemp

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