I need to check if a numerical array is subset of larger one.
what would be simplest way to do it?
thanks.

It's included on the FAQ section of the perl documentation. My advise is to use a Hash table.

Do you have something done ? If yes, you can post here to have a look.

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Your advice/approach is conceptually and in many cases practically correct.

However, for big datasets hash might be too memory consuming, so in such a case sorting of arrays first and then application of trivial common-difference algorithm to the sorted arrays might be the practical way to go.

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thanks for the replies. I had searched Google and this forum, and tried this:

but for some reason it doesn't work as expected. dataset is very small. elements are sorted, order is not relevant.

What did you do debug the problem ? Debugging is finding the very first place in your code in which the code doesn't work as expected.

The code you published doesn't make sense - because it's partial code, not full one.

Do you have

in the beginning of your code ?

Why did you mention that the elements are sorted ? For the approach with hash they needn't be sorted.

thing is, it partially works. I have 'use warning;' but not 'use strict;'

trying to check if array is subset of this: (2,3,10,7,11,15,16,19,20,21,22,25,26)
so (10,20,25) should be ok and (14,23,26) not. but when I test with entire set, it reports error for some elements (which should be fine).

Put

- there is no sense for us here spending time on possible mistakes to be automatically caught by 'use strict;'.

As I said, it doesn't make sense looking at partial code. The partial code you've published can not work by definition. It doesn't necessarily mean the code is wrong, simply an important part may be missing, and I do not know whether it exists in the full code.

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if I use strict the damn thing won't run at all. it doesn't even come close to problem. anyway, thanks, I'll try to sort out minor issues first.

The code looks good, it works very well. The only thing you're missing is that the hash must be populated somewhere before these lines of code...

Markus

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Because you are making mistakes.

Because you just copy-paste code without trying to understand how it should work.

Did you read 'perldoc -f exists' ?

I.e. do you understand why and how the code is supposed to work ? Here is an analogy for you: you are at a class to study arithmetic. Instead of trying to understand and learn how to perform calculations you are frantically pressing calculator buttons, and the calculator refuses to work - because there is no battery in it, and you don't even understand it needs some power source.

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relax man..
anyway I figured it out. I now know why hashes can't have odd number of elements.
initial try was this:
my %shash = (2,3,10,7,11,15,16,19,20,21,22,25,26);

so I tried:
my %shash = (1,2,2,3,3,10,4,7,5,6,5,15,7,16,8,19,9,20,10,21,11,22,12,25,13,26);

and ended up with:
my %shash = (2,1,3,1,10,1,7,1,11,1,15,1,16,1,19,1,20,1,21,1,22,1,25,1,26,1);

which so far seems to work fine.
about the strict. the only problem was that bunch of variables weren't declared properly, it couldn't help me with hashes.
I should reduce number of variables.

thanks all.

- sorry, but you make claims as if know something though in fact you don't.

First and foremost, 'use strict;' changes semantics. You need to understand what lexical scope is ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_...ter_science%29 ) and what dynamic scope is ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_...ynamic_scoping ).

'use strict;' also allows you to catch things like


- this is a very revealing statement. In translation from English into Simple it means: "I started using hashes not even bothering to read what they are beforehand". The same situation as with 'exists', isn't it ?


- of course, it is nonsense - just because you didn't bother to read what hashes are and what 'exists' does, or did read ?

And, by the way, Perl has a nice syntax sugar for hashes:

.

As your responses show, you didn't make a minimal decency effort to learn first, but started from searching the web for a piece of code.

Or I am wrong, you've started from http://perldoc.perl.org/ and grabbed all your code and approaches from there ?

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And how do you know elements are sorted ? I am addressing the issue after looking at your code snippets.

I.e. how do you know that Perl uses hashes with sorted keys ? And at all hashes with ordered keys ? Where did you read about it ? Do you think hashes with ordered keys are the simplest kind of hashes ?

um, are all those questions rhetorical ?
I was referring to array, its elements are sorted, hash is a 'constant' (if that makes any sense).
yes, I don't know much about arrays, hashes, or Perl in general. that's why I asked the question.
basically I try various things, modify examples, solve problems with help of google.
I should have read about hashes, exist and other stuff before posting, sorry.

Hi,

your code may work. But why do you need a program for this (one can see if one array is a subset of the other)? or how do you create the hash when the array has 10000 elements?

Markus