Probably one of the fastest and most reliable ways would be to do the following:

# create a hash representing @array2
my %hash;
$hash{$_} = undef foreach (@array2);

# grep only leaves what evaluates to true.
# if an element of array1 is not in array2, it is
# left in place
@array1 = grep { not exists $hash{$_} } @array1;

[download]

To perform your original approach, you would probably want to use the command splice, like so:

if($array1[$search] eq $array[$search2]){
    splice(@array1,$search,1); # remove 1 element from index $search i
+n @array1
    $search--; # the next element is already at $search. decrement so 
+when it's incremented we'll have the same value.
}

[download]


But this implementation is very inefficient.

-nuffin
zz zZ Z Z #!perl

In reply to Re: subtract one array from another by nothingmuch
in thread subtract one array from another by Anonymous Monk

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