String Prefixes

March 8, 2016

Two strings have a common prefix that consists of the longest prefix of the strings that is the same. For instance, the strings “I love cats” and “I love dogs” have the common prefix “I love ” (including a trailing space at the end of love, which doesn’t appear properly in some browsers).

Your task is to write a program that finds the common prefix of a list of strings (possibly more than two strings). When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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Posted by programmingpraxis
Filed in Exercises
8 Comments »

8 Responses to “String Prefixes”

  1. Paul said
    March 8, 2016 at 10:07 AM

    In Python.

    def string_prefix(seq):
    longest_prefix = []
    for e in zip(*seq):
        a = e[0]
        if any(a != ei for ei in e[1:]):
            break
        longest_prefix.append(a)
    return "'" + "".join(longest_prefix) + "'"
  2. Rutger said
    March 8, 2016 at 1:58 PM 
    import itertools

def longest_common_prefix(a,b):
	return "".join([x[0] for x in itertools.takewhile(lambda x: x[0]==x[1], zip(list(a), list(b)))])

print longest_common_prefix("123", "125")
print longest_common_prefix("123", "1234")
print longest_common_prefix("i love coding", "i love tesiut")
  3. Jussi Piitulainen said
    March 8, 2016 at 2:51 PM

    In Python’s standard library.

    >>> import os
>>> os.path.commonprefix(['I love cats', 'I love dogs', 'I love oranges'])
'I love '
  4. Paul said
    March 8, 2016 at 4:58 PM

    @Jussi: Cool solution. I did not know os.path.commonprefix.

  5. John Cowan said
    March 8, 2016 at 6:15 PM

    Except of course that strings aren’t lists in Scheme, but more like specialized vectors, so you have to iterate on indexes rather than using car-cdr deconstruction. (Though there was a Lisp at one time that provided string functions “char” and “chdr”.) Fortunately, SRFI 13 has string-prefix-length, so we can write (substring s1 0 (string-prefix-length s1 s2)). String-fold is also available in SRFI 13 and R7RS.

  6. matthew said
    March 8, 2016 at 9:55 PM 
    #include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
template<typename T>
void f(const T *a, int &n, const T **p, const T **q) {
  if (q-p == 1) {
    for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
      if (a[i] != (*p)[i]) {
        n = i;
        break;
      }
    }
  } else {
    T **r = p+(q-p)/2;
    f(a,n,p,r);
    f(a,n,r,q);
  }
}

int main(int argc, const char *argv[])
{
  int n = strlen(argv[1]);
  f(argv[1],n,argv+2,argv+argc);
  printf("%.*s\n",n,n,argv[1]);
}
  7. matthew said
    March 8, 2016 at 10:01 PM

    Oops, that version isn’t quite right, it should be:

    #include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
template<typename T>
void f(const T *a, int &n, const T **p, const T **q) {
  if (q-p == 1) {
    for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
      if (a[i] != (*p)[i]) {
        n = i;
        break;
      }
    }
  } else {
    const T **r = p+(q-p)/2;
    f(a,n,p,r);
    f(a,n,r,q);
  }
}

int main(int argc, const char *argv[])
{
  int n = strlen(argv[1]);
  f(argv[1],n,argv+2,argv+argc);
  printf("%.*s\n",n,argv[1]);
}
  8. catalinc said
    March 16, 2016 at 8:09 PM 
    def str_prefix(s1, s2):
    i = 0
    k = min(len(s1), len(s2))
    while i < k and s1[i] == s2[i]:
        i += 1
    return s1[0:i]


def seq_prefix(seq):
    p = None
    for s in seq:
        if p is None:
            p = s
        else:
            p = str_prefix(p, s)
    return p or ''

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print(seq_prefix(['I love cats', 'I love dogs', 'I love pasta']))

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