What's the fastest way to check if a word from one string is in another string?

Question

I have a string of words; let\'s call them bad:

bad = \"foo bar baz\"

I can keep this string as a whitespace separated string,

Answer 1

If the list of bad words gets huge, a hash is a lot faster:

    require 'benchmark'

    bad = ('aaa'..'zzz').to_a    # 17576 words
    str= "What's the fasted way to check if any word from the bad string is within my "
    str += "comparison string, and what's the fastest way to remove said word if it's "
    str += "found" 
    str *= 10

    badex = /\b(#{bad.join('|')})\b/i

    bad_hash = {}
    bad.each{|w| bad_hash[w] = true}

    n = 10
    Benchmark.bm(10) do |x|

      x.report('regex:') {n.times do 
        str.gsub(badex,'').squeeze(' ')
      end}

      x.report('hash:') {n.times do
        str.gsub(/\b\w+\b/){|word| bad_hash[word] ? '': word}.squeeze(' ')
      end}

    end
                user     system      total        real
regex:     10.485000   0.000000  10.485000 ( 13.312500)
hash:       0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000000)