Python string pattern recognition/compression

Question

I can do basic regex alright, but this is slightly different, namely I don\'t know what the pattern is going to be.

For example, I have a list of similar strings:

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Answer 1

This seems to be an example of the longest common subsequence problem. One way could be to look at how diffs are generated. The Hunt-McIlroy algorithm seems to have been the first, and is such the simplest, especially since it apparently is non-heuristic.

The first link contains detailed discussion and (pseudo) code examples. Assuming, of course, Im not completely of the track here.