Why not do just what you said?

Sort them into a single array and retain knowledge of where they came from.

i.e. use a hash (or even an array) to map number -> [ $ref_to_source_array, $index_in_source_array ].

Then you can look for a sequence in the sorted array and, for each number in the sequence, look up where it came from.

No code, but it's straightforward I think.

Update: If the memory consumption is excessive, you could encode an identifier for the source array and the index in a single scalar, e.g. "a1:1", "a3:4".

You should then be using about 4 times your original memory, if that's too much you could destroy your original arrays and recreate them afterwards from the lookup info :-)

In reply to Re: Searching parallel arrays. by jbert
in thread Searching parallel arrays. by BrowserUk

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