Array include any value from another array?

Question

What\'s the most efficient way to test if an array contains any element from a second array?

Two examples below, attempting to answer the question does foods

Answer 1

How about Enumerable#any?

>> cheeses = %w(chedder stilton brie mozzarella feta haloumi)
=> ["chedder", "stilton", "brie", "mozzarella", "feta", "haloumi"]
>> foods = %w(pizza feta foods bread biscuits yoghurt bacon)
=> ["pizza", "feta", "foods", "bread", "biscuits", "yoghurt", "bacon"]
>> foods.any? {|food| cheeses.include?(food) }
=> true

Benchmark script:

require "benchmark"
N = 1_000_000
puts "ruby version: #{RUBY_VERSION}"

CHEESES = %w(chedder stilton brie mozzarella feta haloumi).freeze
FOODS = %w(pizza feta foods bread biscuits yoghurt bacon).freeze

Benchmark.bm(15) do |b|
  b.report("&, empty?") { N.times { (FOODS & CHEESES).empty? } }
  b.report("any?, include?") { N.times { FOODS.any? {|food| CHEESES.include?(food) } } }
end

Result:

ruby version: 2.1.9
                      user     system      total        real
&, empty?         1.170000   0.000000   1.170000 (  1.172507)
any?, include?    0.660000   0.000000   0.660000 (  0.666015)

Answer 2

(cheeses & foods).empty?

As Marc-André Lafortune said in comments, & works in linear time while any? + include? will be quadratic. For larger sets of data, linear time will be faster. For small data sets, any? + include? may be faster as shown by Lee Jarvis' answer -- probably because & allocates a new Array while another solution does not and works as a simple nested loop to return a boolean.

Answer 3

You can check if the intersection is empty.

cheeses = %w(chedder stilton brie mozzarella feta haloumi)
foods = %w(pizza feta foods bread biscuits yoghurt bacon)
foods & cheeses
=> ["feta"] 
(foods & cheeses).empty?
=> false

Answer 4

require "benchmark"
N = 1_000_000
puts "ruby version: #{RUBY_VERSION}"

CHEESES = %w(chedder stilton brie mozzarella feta haloumi).freeze
FOODS = %w(pizza feta foods bread biscuits yoghurt bacon).freeze

Benchmark.bm(15) do |b|
  b.report("&, empty?") { N.times { (FOODS & CHEESES).empty? } }  
  b.report("any?, include?") { N.times { FOODS.any? {|food| CHEESES.include?(food) } } }  
  b.report("disjoint?") { N.times { FOODS.to_set.disjoint? CHEESES.to_set }}
end  
                      user     system      total        real
&, empty?         0.751068   0.000571   0.751639 (  0.752745)
any?, include?    0.408251   0.000133   0.408384 (  0.408438)
disjoint?        11.616006   0.014806  11.630812 ( 11.637300)

Answer 5

Set.new(cheeses).disjoint? Set.new(foods)