Longest common substring from more than two strings

I'm looking for a Python library for finding the longest common sub-string from a set of strings. There are two ways to solve this problem:

• using suffix trees
• using dynamic programming.

Method implemented is not important. It is important it can be used for a set of strings (not only two strings).

Solution 1:

These paired functions will find the longest common string in any arbitrary array of strings:

def long_substr(data):
    substr = ''
    if len(data) > 1 and len(data[0]) > 0:
        for i in range(len(data[0])):
            for j in range(len(data[0])-i+1):
                if j > len(substr) and is_substr(data[0][i:i+j], data):
                    substr = data[0][i:i+j]
    return substr

def is_substr(find, data):
    if len(data) < 1 and len(find) < 1:
        return False
    for i in range(len(data)):
        if find not in data[i]:
            return False
    return True


print long_substr(['Oh, hello, my friend.',
                   'I prefer Jelly Belly beans.',
                   'When hell freezes over!'])

No doubt the algorithm could be improved and I've not had a lot of exposure to Python, so maybe it could be more efficient syntactically as well, but it should do the job.

EDIT: in-lined the second is_substr function as demonstrated by J.F. Sebastian. Usage remains the same. Note: no change to algorithm.

def long_substr(data):
    substr = ''
    if len(data) > 1 and len(data[0]) > 0:
        for i in range(len(data[0])):
            for j in range(len(data[0])-i+1):
                if j > len(substr) and all(data[0][i:i+j] in x for x in data):
                    substr = data[0][i:i+j]
    return substr

Hope this helps,

Jason.

Solution 2:

This can be done shorter:

def long_substr(data):
  substrs = lambda x: {x[i:i+j] for i in range(len(x)) for j in range(len(x) - i + 1)}
  s = substrs(data[0])
  for val in data[1:]:
    s.intersection_update(substrs(val))
  return max(s, key=len)

set's are (probably) implemented as hash-maps, which makes this a bit inefficient. If you (1) implement a set datatype as a trie and (2) just store the postfixes in the trie and then force each node to be an endpoint (this would be the equivalent of adding all substrings), THEN in theory I would guess this baby is pretty memory efficient, especially since intersections of tries are super-easy.

Nevertheless, this is short and premature optimization is the root of a significant amount of wasted time.

Solution 3:

def common_prefix(strings):
    """ Find the longest string that is a prefix of all the strings.
    """
    if not strings:
        return ''
    prefix = strings[0]
    for s in strings:
        if len(s) < len(prefix):
            prefix = prefix[:len(s)]
        if not prefix:
            return ''
        for i in range(len(prefix)):
            if prefix[i] != s[i]:
                prefix = prefix[:i]
                break
    return prefix

From http://bitbucket.org/ned/cog/src/tip/cogapp/whiteutils.py