How can one find out the pairwise difference and product between elements in a perl array without using a perl module?

[supriyoch_2008]

Hi PerlMonks,

I have an array like @array = qw/a b c d/; I am interested to find out the pairwise difference and product between any two elements in the array by taking out each element from the array and then calculating the difference and the product as shown in the expected result. Since there are 4 elements, there will be n(n-1)/2=6 pairwise differences and products, where n=4.

#!usr/bin/perl 
use warnings;
 
@array=qw/a b c d/; 
# Code for taking out each element: 

foreach $item (@array) { $each_ele=$item;
  print"\n Each element: $each_ele\n"; }  

# Code ?????
............
............

exit;

The expected result should look like:

Difference: 
a-b 
a-c 
a-d 
b-c 
b-d 
c-d 

Product: 
a.b
a.c
a.d 
b.c 
b.d 
c.d

[Corion]

I suggest you look at the code of a module implementing this, and then take that code.

[hdb]

For starters, here is a destructive solution for the differences:

use strict;
use warnings;
 
my @array=qw/a b c d/; 

while( my $first = shift @array ) {
    print "$first-$_\n" for @array;
}

[LanX]

... and the obvious non-destructive solution is to use to nested loops operating on indices.

So whats the problem?

[hdb]

And a complete solution:

use strict;
use warnings;
 
my @array=qw/a b c d/; 
my $diff = join"",map{s/(\d+)/$array[$1]/g;$_.$/}grep{eval$_<0}glob("{
+".join(",",0..$#array)."}-{".join(",",0..$#array)."}");
my $prod = $diff;
$prod =~ tr/-/./;
print "Differences:\n$diff\nProducts:\n$prod";

[Arunbear]

One way (differences and products are left as an exercise):

% perl -E '@a = 1 .. 4; for my $x (@a) { %set = map { $_ => 1 } @a; de
+lete $set{$x}; say "$x, $_" for keys %set; }'
1, 4
1, 3
1, 2
2, 4
2, 1
2, 3
3, 4
3, 1
3, 2
4, 1
4, 3
4, 2
%

[Laurent_R]

Not sure it helps a lot in your case, but this is one possible way to generate permutations in this session under the Perl debugger:

  DB<1> @array=qw/a b c d/

  DB<2> $stringified = join ',', @array;

  DB<3>  @permutations  = glob "{$stringified}" x 2;

  DB<4>  map {s/(.)(.)/$1-$2/} @permutations

  DB<5> x  @permutations
0  'a-a'
1  'a-b'
2  'a-c'
3  'a-d'
4  'b-a'
5  'b-b'
6  'b-c'
7  'b-d'
8  'c-a'
9  'c-b'
10  'c-c'
11  'c-d'
12  'd-a'
13  'd-b'
14  'd-c'
15  'd-d'

Of course, in your case, additional filtering would be necessary. I think that the modules mentionned by other monks are probably a better solution.

[Anonymous Monk]

Not as fancy as some, but gives the output you specified. O might not be too bad as it's only a single pass through for the main number, and both operations can be done on the same pass. As always, YMMV.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my @array=qw/a b c d/;

while ( @array > 1 ) {
    my $first = shift(@array);
    for my $next ( @array ) {
        # take diff $first - $next;
        # take product $first * $next;
        print sprintf("%-8s%s\n","$first - $next","$first * $next");
    }
}

exit;

__END__

a - b   a * b
a - c   a * c
a - d   a * d
b - c   b * c
b - d   b * d
c - d   c * d