On 12/12/06, Helliwell, Kim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Is there a function (perhaps in a library module) that would take two strings and return the common substring (if any) contained in the arguments?
You want the longest possible common substring? Or all of the longest ones, if there's more than one? I did something like this once. I used Perl's ability to treat strings as bitstrings to xor one string against the other, at various positions. Then I checked each xor result for a string of zeroes (i.e. character matches) longer than any yet known, recording the length and location of each match. Once I had checked all possible offsets that could give a long-enough match, it was a simple matter to extract the matching substring. Of course, that method assumed ASCII characters were bytes. If you might have non-byte characters in your data, this algorithom could still work, but you'll need to code with more care. Hope this helps! --Tom Phoenix Stonehenge Perl Training -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
