Inner and outer loops

[kylefoley76]

Let's say I have two arrays with 4 of the same members. The members are A B C E. Now let's say I want to loop through both arrays to see if there is a match. To do that I had to do the following:


For i = 1 to ubound(1st_array)
For j = 1 to ubound(2nd_array)
if 1st_array(i) = 2nd_array(j) then
goto Z
end if
next
next

Now if there is no match, it seems that Excel will redundantly check certain combinations twice. For example, we only need check the following combinations

AB
AC
AD
AE

BC
BD
BE

CD
CE

But given the way that the function is set up, Excel will check some members more than once. It will also check

BA
CB
CA
DA
DB
DC

And it need not check those. This is not a big problem when we are dealing with arrays of 4 members but it is a problem when we are dealing with an array of 20 members. How do I get around this problem?

 

[Danerida]

With arrays, those combinations are all treated as unique, even though they are made up of the same combinations of letters. Because the order of the letters is different, they are unique to the others.