in reply to Re: confusing array comparison
in thread confusing array comparison

Hi there,

thanks for your answer! i dont really understand your code so not sure how to adapt this to work for real data!?

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Re^3: confusing array comparison
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Feb 07, 2006 at 13:17 UTC

    This first bit is just setting up 4 arrays with random integer test data.

    my @a = (shuffle 1 .. $N)[ 0 .. $E ]; my @b = (shuffle 1 .. $N)[ 0 .. $E ]; my @c = (shuffle 1 .. $N)[ 0 .. $E ]; my @d = (shuffle 1 .. $N)[ 0 .. $E ];

    This bit builds a hash of hashes using the values from the arrays as primary keys and the 'name' of the array that value came from as the secondary key.

    my %comp; $comp{ $_ }{a} = 'a' for @a; $comp{ $_ }{b} = 'b' for @b; $comp{ $_ }{c} = 'c' for @c; $comp{ $_ }{d} = 'd' for @d;

    print a header

    print " : a b c d\n--------------";

    And this bit does the display

    printf "%4s : %s\n", $_, join ' ', map{ $_||'-' } @{ $comp{ $_ } }{ 'a'..'d' } for sort{$a<=>$b} keys %comp;

    In reverse order

    for sort{$a<=>$b} keys %comp;

    For each key (ie. each unique value from the four arrays), in the primary hash, sorted into (in this case ascending numeric order),

    @{ $comp{ $_ } }{ 'a'..'d' }

    Take a slice across the hash for this value,

    map{ $_||'-' }

    Pass the values through a map to replace undef values by a token ('-') to represent that this value was missing in this array.

    join ' ',

    joins the 'found' and 'missing' tokens into a string with some spaces for presentation.

    printf "%4s : %s\n", $_,

    and print out the value, and the string showing which arrays it was found in.

    Each iteration of that loop gives you one line showing 'this value' appeared/was missing in these arrays. So for my test data you read this line:

    6 : a b - d

    As "The value 6 appeared in array @a @b @d but was missing from @c"


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