Tetris-ing an array

Question

Consider the following array:

/www/htdocs/1/sites/lib/abcdedd
/www/htdocs/1/sites/conf/xyz
/www/htdocs/1/sites/conf/abc/         


        

Answer 1

This has de advantage of not having linear time complexity; however, for most cases the sort will definitely not be the operation taking more time.

Basically, the clever part (at least I couldn't find a fault with it) here is that after sorting you will only have to compare the first path with the last.

sort($a);
$a = array_map(function ($el) { return explode("/", $el); }, $a);
$first = reset($a);
$last = end($a);
for ($eqdepth = 0; $first[$eqdepth] === $last[$eqdepth]; $eqdepth++) {}
array_walk($a,
    function (&$el) use ($eqdepth) {
        for ($i = 0; $i < $eqdepth; $i++) {
            array_shift($el);
        }
     });
$res = array_map(function ($el) { return implode("/", $el); }, $a);