Thank you both for the replies! I hope everyone in the thread can see this, and not just the author of the note on which I hit the reply button. Okay, so if I'm getting this right, it looks like in this example, you're taking the word 'fool' and comparing its characters to each of the five words in the array, and since 'fool' matches itself exactly, the return on that one is all zeros. Any place there is not a zero is a place where the words differ. (I'm not immediately sure why the "difference" between the character 'l' and 't' would be 30 but I'm sure it's easily explained.) So I see how this works in principle, to compare two given words and look for word pairings that yield a one-character difference. But then how might I use this to solve the problem that I have, which is to find -- from let's say a massive dictionary of English language words -- all pairs of words that are the same except for one letter, and in particular, for that character difference to be that one has an R while the other has an S? Again, many thanks.

In reply to Re^3: Comparing Lines within a Word List by dominick_t
in thread Comparing Lines within a Word List by dominick_t

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.