No idea if this is faster, but I just wanted to post a version of my first code that works, tested, for any number of arguments:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $charClass = '[a-z]'; #change as desired
my @commonChars = compareChars();
print "Num common chars: ",scalar @commonChars,"\n";
### sub assumes case insensitivity is appropriate ###
sub compareChars {
my $requiredCount = @ARGV;
my %found;
my @answer;
for my $word ( @ARGV ) {
my %nonredundantChars = map { $_ => 1 } split //, $word;
$word = join '', keys %nonredundantChars;
$found{lc $1}++ while ( $word =~ m/($charClass)/gi )
}
while ( ( my $char, my $count ) = each %found ) {
push @answer, $char if $count == $requiredCount;
}
return @answer;
}