It all depends on what you mean by "better" :-)

One way is to count number of occurrences of characters in a hash: 

sub count {
   my $str = shift;
   my %h;
   $h{$_}++ for split //, $str;
   return \%h;
}

[download]

Then you can compare those hashes: 

sub check {
   my ($target, $word) = @_;
   return 0 if length($target) < length($word);
   my %target = %{ count($target) };
   my %word   = %{ count($word) };
   for (keys %word) {
      no warnings 'unintialized';
      if ($target{$_} < $word{$_}) {
          print "'$word' can not be made out of letters of '$target', 
+because it has $word{$_} $_'s\n";
          return 0;
      } 
   }
   return 1;
}

[download]

That's a lot longer than your code, but maybe a bit faster if you want to check lots of words against a common target (in which case you can cache %target).

Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.

In reply to Re: Check if a word is included in another by moritz
in thread Check if a word is included in another by b4swine

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