Find the longest common starting substring in a set of strings [closed]

Answer 1

You just need to traverse all strings until they differ, then take the substring up to this point.

Pseudocode:

loop for i upfrom 0
     while all strings[i] are equal
     finally return substring[0..i]

Common Lisp:

(defun longest-common-starting-substring (&rest strings)
  (loop for i from 0 below (apply #'min (mapcar #'length strings))
     while (apply #'char=
                  (mapcar (lambda (string) (aref string i))
                          strings))
     finally (return (subseq (first strings) 0 i))))

Answer 2

Realizing the risk of this turning into a match of code golf (or is that the intention?), here's my solution using sed, copied from my answer to another SO question and shortened to 36 chars (30 of which are the actual sed expression). It expects the strings (each on a seperate line) to be supplied on standard input or in files passed as additional arguments.

sed 'N;s/^\(.*\).*\n\1.*$/\1\n\1/;D'

A script with sed in the shebang line weighs in at 45 chars:

#!/bin/sed -f
N;s/^\(.*\).*\n\1.*$/\1\n\1/;D

A test run of the script (named longestprefix), with strings supplied as a "here document":

$ ./longestprefix <<EOF
> interspecies
> interstelar
> interstate
> EOF
inters
$

Answer 3

Python 2.6 (r26:66714, Oct  4 2008, 02:48:43) 

>>> a = ['interspecies', 'interstelar', 'interstate']

>>> print a[0][:max(
        [i for i in range(min(map(len, a))) 
            if len(set(map(lambda e: e[i], a))) == 1]
        ) + 1]

inters

• i for i in range(min(map(len, a))), number of maximum lookups can't be greater than the length of the shortest string; in this example this would evaluate to [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

• len(set(map(lambda e: e[i], a))), 1) create an array of the i-thcharacter for each string in the list; 2) make a set out of it; 3) determine the size of the set

• [i for i in range(min(map(len, a))) if len(set(map(lambda e: e[i], a))) == 1], include just the characters, for which the size of the set is 1 (all characters at that position were the same ..); here it would evaluate to [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• finally take the max, add one, and get the substring ...

Note: the above does not work for a = ['intersyate', 'intersxate', 'interstate', 'intersrate'], but this would:

 >>> index = len(
         filter(lambda l: l[0] == l[1], 
             [ x for x in enumerate(
                 [i for i in range(min(map(len, a))) 
                     if len(set(map(lambda e: e[i], a))) == 1]
         )]))
 >>> a[0][:index]
 inters

Answer 4

A ruby version based on @Svante's algorithm. Runs ~3x as fast as my first one.

 def common_prefix set 
   i=0
   rest=set[1..-1]
   set[0].each_byte{|c|
     rest.each{|e|return set[0][0...i] if e[i]!=c}
     i+=1
   }
   set
 end

Answer 5

The accepted solution is broken (for example, it returns a for strings like ['a', 'ba']). The fix is very simple, you literally have to change only 3 characters (from indexOf(tem1) == -1 to indexOf(tem1) != 0) and the function would work as expected.

Unfortunately, when I tried to edit the answer to fix the typo, SO told me that "edits must be at least 6 characters". I could change more then those 3 chars, by improving naming and readability but that feels like a little bit too much.

So, below is a fixed and improved (at least from my point of view) version of the kennebec's solution:

function commonPrefix(words) {
  max_word = words.reduce(function(a, b) { return a > b ? a : b });
  prefix   = words.reduce(function(a, b) { return a > b ? b : a }); // min word

  while(max_word.indexOf(prefix) != 0) {
    prefix = prefix.slice(0, -1);
  }

  return prefix;
}

(on jsFiddle)

Note, that it uses reduce method (JavaScript 1.8) in order to find alphanumeric max / min instead of sorting the array and then fetching the first and the last elements of it.

Answer 6

In Python:

>>> from os.path import commonprefix
>>> commonprefix('interspecies interstelar interstate'.split())
'inters'