Problem Statement: Given a set of strings, find the longest common prefix.
Examples:
Input: {"neveropen", "neveropen", "geek", "geezer"}
Output: "gee"
Input: {"apple", "ape", "april"}
Output: "ap"
The longest common prefix for an array of strings is the common prefix between 2 most dissimilar strings. For example, in the given array {“apple”, “ape”, “zebra”}, there is no common prefix because the 2 most dissimilar strings of the array “ape” and “zebra” do not share any starting characters.
We have discussed five different approaches in below posts.
In this post a new method based on sorting is discussed. The idea is to sort the array of strings and find the common prefix of the first and last string of the sorted array.
C++
// C++ program to find longest common prefix // of given array of words.#include<iostream>#include<algorithm>using namespace std;// Function to find the longest common prefixstring longestCommonPrefix(string ar[], int n){ // If size is 0, return empty string if (n == 0) return ""; if (n == 1) return ar[0]; // Sort the given array sort(ar, ar + n); // Find the minimum length from // first and last string int en = min(ar[0].size(), ar[n - 1].size()); // Now the common prefix in first and // last string is the longest common prefix string first = ar[0], last = ar[n - 1]; int i = 0; while (i < en && first[i] == last[i]) i++; string pre = first.substr(0, i); return pre;}// Driver Codeint main(){ string ar[] = {"neveropen", "neveropen", "geek", "geezer"}; int n = sizeof(ar) / sizeof(ar[0]); cout << "The longest common prefix is: " << longestCommonPrefix(ar, n); return 0;}// This code is contributed by jrolofmeister |
The longest common prefix is: gee
Time Complexity: O(MAX * n * log n ) where n is the number of strings in the array and MAX is maximum number of characters in any string. Please note that comparison of two strings would take at most O(MAX) time and for sorting n strings, we would need O(MAX * n * log n ) time.
Auxiliary Space: O(1) as no extra space has been used.
Please refer complete article on Longest Common Prefix using Sorting for more details!
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