Check if a string contains any substrings from an array

Question

I want to check if any elements in this array words = ["foo", "bar", "spooky", "rick james"] are substrings of the phrase sentence = "something spooky this way comes".

Return true if there is any match, false if not.

My current solution (works but probably inefficient, I'm still learning Ruby):

is_there_a_substring = false
words.each do |word|
  if sentence.includes?(word)
    is_there_a_substring = true
    break
  end
end
return is_there_a_substring

Paige Ruten · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-09 03:07:42Z

23

Your solution is efficient, it's just not as expressive as Ruby allows you to be. Ruby provides the Enumerable#any? method to express what you are doing with that loop:

words.any? { |word| sentence.include?(word) }

edited May 9, 2017 at 3:07

answered Apr 27, 2014 at 5:16

Paige Ruten

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3 Comments

Don P Over a year ago

gotta love ruby... (will accept in 4 min when timer is up)

Radek Over a year ago

use include? as includes? doesn't work for me in ruby2.0

JEMaddux Over a year ago

There is no includes? in Ruby. This answer needs to be edited to use include?

Stefan · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-27 06:24:06Z

5

Another option is to use a regular expression:

 if Regexp.union(words) =~ sentence
   # ...
 end

answered Apr 27, 2014 at 6:24

Stefan

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