Okay, at first, I didnt think I understood your question, but I am going to take one more stab at it.

Each element of the array has the form "X12:345" I am comparing $element and $compare to find a match such that if $element = X12:345, I want to find $compare = X0:344 or $compare = X24:344. Any suggestions as to how I can make this more efficient would be greatly appreciated.

This is the part that got me to thinking, it seemed to me that you are searching the array to find similar elements to another element, and that those relationships are not arbitrary. So, if that is correct, than you could try this: 

my %elements = map { $_ => 1 } @array;

foreach my $element (@array) {
    # now construct copies of each $element 
    # based on the patterns you describe
    my $transformed_element = transform($element);
    # then let the hash find the transformation
    print "Success!" if exists $elements{$transformed_element};
}

[download]
You can also store all your transformations in a hash, where the key is the name of the transformation, and the value is a subroutine reference (basically a dispatch table). Then you could loop through the dispatch table and compare each transformation. Here is some code to illustrate: 
my %elements = map { $_ => 1 } @array;

foreach my $element (@array) {
    foreach my $tranformation (keys %transformations) {
        my $transformed_element = $transformations{$tranformation}->($
+element);
        if (exists $elements{$transformed_element}) {
            print "Found a $tranformation of $element";
        }
    }
}

[download]

Once again, I may be totally off on what you are asking for, but I hope this helps.

-stvn

In reply to Re: recursive array search by stvn
in thread recursive array search by state-o-dis-array

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