Re: List Compare

Assuming you're working with just strings, something like the following would work:

my @a = 'a' .. 'c';
my @b = 'a' .. 'f';

my $compare = do {
    my $temp = join '.*?', @a;
    qr/$temp/;
};

sub compare {
    my @b = @_;

    my $temp = join '', @b;
    return $temp =~ $compare;
}
[download]

My criteria for good software:

Does it work?
Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

Comment on Re: List Compare Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: List Compare by inman (Curate) on Oct 21, 2005 at 14:32 UTC
You beat me to it!! I had it the other way round though as per the OPs example. The joined @a is only calculated once and then matched against the regex made from joining @b with .? `my @a= qw (a b c d e f); my @b= qw (a b c); my $joined_a = join '', @a; my $joined_b = join '.?', @b; print "yes!\n" if $joined_a =~ /$joined_b/;` [download] But I guess there are no prizes for coming second...	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: List Compare by sauoq (Abbot) on Oct 21, 2005 at 20:11 UTC
This... uh... doesn't meet your first criteria for good software. (And it didn't even before he updated his spec.) Set `@b = qw( a foobar c )` to see it fail. You might get away with something like that by including some `"\0"`s in your join but I certainly would not recommend it. Even before he added the additional constraint that there could be no missing elements, this would be easily solved with a single loop. -sauoq "My two cents aren't worth a dime.";	[reply] [d/l] [select]