— Feb 05, 2013

Update: After writing this, I discovered a better method for solving this problem. I thought it worth going ahead and publishing this post since I took the time to write it. Maybe there’s some good buried in here somewhere. I think my favorite part of the below idea is its use of inject. It uses short-circuited logic to quickly match during the injection loop. Live and learn! :)

For a recent Rails project, I needed to exclude some items from an Array. The problem was I needed to exclude items that matched certain patterns rather than the exact strings. So my_arr - excluded_items was out.

Say we have an array that looks like this:

    an_array = %w(something_suffix1 something_with_this_also and_this)

And we want to exclude any elements containing the string "_with" or "_suffix1".

Introducing Array#fuzzy_include?

https://gist.github.com/iamvery/4692735

    class Array
      def fuzzy_include?(search_value, regex_format = '%s')
        inject(false) do |is_found, array_value|
          is_found or !!(search_value =~ /#{regex_format % array_value}/)
        end
      end
    end

This method will see if the any of the array’s items match the given string. It uses each value of the array as a regular expression against the given value.

The above problem can be solved by:

    excluded_substrings = %w(_with _suffix1)
    
    an_array.delete_if do |item|
      excluded_substrings.fuzzy_include?(item)
    end
    # => ["and_this"]

You can also provide a “format” (for lack of a better word) for the regular expression that will be used to match items.

You could for example find if a given string ended in a number of suffixes.

    excluded_substrings = %w(_with _this)
    
    an_array.delete_if do |item|
      excluded_substrings.fuzzy_include?(item, '%s$')
    end
    # => ["something_suffix1", "something_with_this_also"]

In this example, the second value "something_with_this_also" is not excluded because it does not end with "_with" as specified by the format "%s$".

I must admit, something about this solution doesn’t quite feel “right”, but it was at least a fun little experiment. Feel free to tell me if you think I’m way out in left field over this solution. :)