Your problem _sounds_ complicated, but it's pretty simple, really.

First off, the 2 matching strings have to be the same length, so you can use the length function to check that.

Next, if you use substr to look at the last character of 2 strings, the first n-1 characters have to be equal and the last characters have to differ by 1 when compared using ord, or the strings aren't a match.

Finally, you can use split to split your strings using a sequence of digits as the delimiter, like my @fields=split /(\d+)/,$str; Using the /(\d+)/, the delimiter will get captured too, and now you can make sure that the string fields are the same, and the number field differs only by one.

Once you've got all that bundled into a comparison function, all you have to do is scan the list for matches for each string, and pair them up...

I think you can get the rest of the way to your answer from here...


Mike

In reply to Re: searching for strings by RMGir
in thread searching for strings by steph_bow

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