You have a SQL query and two arrays, find the like elements between the two arrays.
(I am assuming that a few of you have your own opinions on how to solve this, and that is excellent - please enlighten me)
The first thought that popped into my head was that this was not a coding interview, the second was that i really needed a laptop to work through this, and the third was - doesn't PowerShell have a cmdlet that will do this for me?
Back at home, I thought I would investigate the PowerShell angle. Since I had access to a laptop.
I am assuming a small dataset
First, lets build a couple arrays to validate with:
$array1 = "Elmer", "hunter", "Bugs", "rabbit", "Tweety", "bird", "Sylvester", "feline"
$array2 = "Eddie", "investigator", "Roger", "rabbit", "Jessica", "rabbit", "Judge", "doom", "tweety", "bird"
Now, I did add some variation for fun. Because why might this be an important skill?
It might be important because I might need to mine a bunch of data or logs to investigate a pattern.
At this point I have arbitrarily added an additional requirement on myself; I want to see all of the matched data items, not just the matched values. Equivalents vs. equals if you will.
Why? Again, in an investigation I will probably want to use a fuzzy match instead of a literal match. And then I will want to work through the resulting set again. (most likely both with eyes and with code).
In regards to PowerShell doing this for me, I discovered this:
$compared = Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $array1 -DifferenceObject $array2 -IncludeEqual
But when looking at the output, working with this is not very intuitive and it hides my fuzzy match and detail output.
PS C:\Users\Brian> $compared
InputObject SideIndicator
----------- -------------
rabbit ==
Tweety ==
bird ==
Eddie =>
investigator =>
Roger =>
Jessica =>
rabbit =>
Judge =>
doom =>
Elmer <=
hunter <=
Bugs <=
Sylvester <=
feline <=
I actually ended up going back to my original idea;
$likes = @()
foreach ($element1 in $array1){
foreach ($element2 in $array2){
if ($element1 -like $element2){
$likes += $element1;
$likes += $element2;
}
}
}
while not highly efficient and I am sure not wonderful with large data sets, it does give me the results that I wanted for further analysis:
PS C:\Users\Brian> $likes
rabbit
rabbit
rabbit
rabbit
Tweety
tweety
bird
bird
It is easy to see from this output where I might want to go next; counts, deeper analysis, trends, etc. It all depends on the details in the records used.
If you have different ideas that meet my requirements, please share.
