Find common substring between two strings

For completeness, difflib in the standard-library provides loads of sequence-comparison utilities. For instance find_longest_match which finds the longest common substring when used on strings. Example use:

from difflib import SequenceMatcher

string1 = "apple pie available"
string2 = "come have some apple pies"

match = SequenceMatcher(None, string1, string2).find_longest_match(0, len(string1), 0, len(string2))

print(match)  # -> Match(a=0, b=15, size=9)
print(string1[match.a: match.a + match.size])  # -> apple pie
print(string2[match.b: match.b + match.size])  # -> apple pie

def common_start(sa, sb):
    """ returns the longest common substring from the beginning of sa and sb """
    def _iter():
        for a, b in zip(sa, sb):
            if a == b:
                yield a
            else:
                return

    return ''.join(_iter())

>>> common_start("apple pie available", "apple pies")
'apple pie'

Or a slightly stranger way:

def stop_iter():
    """An easy way to break out of a generator"""
    raise StopIteration

def common_start(sa, sb):
    return ''.join(a if a == b else stop_iter() for a, b in zip(sa, sb))

Which might be more readable as

def terminating(cond):
    """An easy way to break out of a generator"""
    if cond:
        return True
    raise StopIteration

def common_start(sa, sb):
    return ''.join(a for a, b in zip(sa, sb) if terminating(a == b))

One might also consider os.path.commonprefix that works on characters and thus can be used for any strings.

import os
common = os.path.commonprefix(['apple pie available', 'apple pies'])
assert common == 'apple pie'

As the function name indicates, this only considers the common prefix of two strings.

Its called Longest Common Substring problem. Here I present a simple, easy to understand but inefficient solution. It will take a long time to produce correct output for large strings, as the complexity of this algorithm is O(N^2).

def longestSubstringFinder(string1, string2):
    answer = ""
    len1, len2 = len(string1), len(string2)
    for i in range(len1):
        match = ""
        for j in range(len2):
            if (i + j < len1 and string1[i + j] == string2[j]):
                match += string2[j]
            else:
                if (len(match) > len(answer)): answer = match
                match = ""
    return answer

print longestSubstringFinder("apple pie available", "apple pies")
print longestSubstringFinder("apples", "appleses")
print longestSubstringFinder("bapples", "cappleses")

Output

apple pie
apples
apples