In this blog, we will discuss the longest common prefix at length and along with that we will also check out a sample word wrap problem.
You might already be familiar with the concept of arrays and how they are used in the context of data structure, but in this blog, we will widen the horizon and discuss the longest common prefix of an array.
If there are two different strings given, you can state that the longest common prefix of the array will be considered to be the common prefix between those two strings. Reading further you will also find profound discussions on the concept of the longest common prefix and, we shall also discuss the word wrap problem.
The longest common prefix of an array
The longest common prefix of an array or of a couple of strings is the longest string which is the prefix in both the strings. For instance, let us assume that there are A1 and A2 strings. The longest common prefix between these two pairs of arrays will be A. That, as we can see here, is the common prefix of both the strings. We can better explain this problem by taking into consideration an example question related to this problem: Q. You have been given an array "ARR" which consists of an "N" number of strings. You are being asked to find out the longest common prefix of this array. In case you figure out that there is no prefix, you can return an empty array.
First, we shall discuss some of the approaches that you can try while solving the given problem.
Approach: Let us assume that in a given array there are strings known as "coding", "codingninja", " codezon", and "coders". Now, as per the first approach, you can try and figure out the alphabets that are matching in the first half of the strings. Here we can clearly see that the alphabets "cod" are common for all the strings. Hence, that becomes the longest common prefix of the example.
Comments