in reply to
to find inter connected items
Using a hash is a good solution. I used the following algorithm: If both the numbers to be made related already belong to different classes, the classes are "merged", i.e. all numbers belonging to the class with a greater index are re-classified to the other class.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
my @a = (1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 8, 8);
my @b = (3, 4, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10);
print Dumper related(\@a, \@b);
sub related {
my @a = @{ +shift };
my @b = @{ +shift };
die "Different length.\n" if @a != @b;
my %r;
PAIR: for my $i (0 .. $#a) {
my @classes;
for my $e ($a[$i], $b[$i]) {
push @classes, $r{$e} if exists $r{$e};
}
# Both numbers already classified. Merge their classes if diff
+erent.
if (@classes == 2) {
next PAIR if $classes[0] == $classes[1];
my ($min, $max) = sort { $a <=> $b } @r{$a[$i], $b[$i]};
$r{$_} = $min for grep $r{$_} == $max, keys %r;
# Just one number already classified. Classify the second one
+to the same class.
} elsif (@classes == 1) {
if (exists $r{$a[$i]}) {
$r{$b[$i]} = $r{$a[$i]};
} else {
$r{$a[$i]} = $r{$b[$i]};
}
# Both numbers are seen for the first time.
} else { # @classes == 0
my $min = $a[$i] < $b[$i] ? $a[$i] : $b[$i];
@r{$a[$i], $b[$i]} = ($min) x 2;
}
}
return \%r;
}