http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=1096877


in reply to Looking for the first item in the chain

Borrowing from Laurent_R's answer, you might want to consider using Graph::Undirected to get the connections. I also borrowed this graph example from somewhere, probably from here at Perl Monks but can't find the original in a search.
#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use Graph; my $g = Graph::Undirected->new; while (<DATA>) { chomp; my ($x, $y) = split /;/; $y = $x if $y eq ''; # will pass $y == 0 if that's the case $g->add_edge($x, $y); } my %pred; for my $aref ($g->connected_components) { my @items = sort {$a <=> $b} @$aref; my $first = $items[0]; for my $element (@items) { $pred{$element} = $first; } } print "$_ => $pred{$_}\n" for sort {$a <=> $b} keys %pred; __DATA__ 567;456 456;345 345;234 234;123 339;228 228;117 131; 435;324 324;213 372;
Prints:
117 => 117 123 => 123 131 => 131 213 => 213 228 => 117 234 => 123 324 => 213 339 => 117 345 => 123 372 => 372 435 => 213 456 => 123 567 => 123
Update: Changed $g->add_edge($x, $y || $x); to $g->add_edge($x, $y); and added $y = $x if $y eq ''; so to allow $y to be a possible zero.