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

Perhaps porting the algorithm Python's os.path.commonprefix(m) uses would work?

def commonprefix(m):
    "Given a list of pathnames, returns the longest common leading component"
    if not m: return ''
    s1 = min(m)
    s2 = max(m)
    n = min(len(s1), len(s2))
    for i in xrange(n):
        if s1[i] != s2[i]:
            return s1[:i]
    return s1[:n]

That is, uh... something like

function commonprefix($m) {
  if(!$m) return "";
  $s1 = min($m);
  $s2 = max($m);
  $n = min(strlen($s1), strlen($s2));
  for($i=0;$i<$n;$i++) if($s1[$i] != $s2[$i]) return substr($s1, 0, $i);
  return substr($s1, 0, $n);
}

After that you can just substr each element of the original list with the length of the common prefix as the start offset.