Longest Common Prefix Algorithm
The Longest Common Prefix (LCP) algorithm is a widely used string processing technique in computer science and programming, aimed at finding the longest common prefix among a set of input strings. The algorithm is particularly useful in applications such as text processing, information retrieval, and bioinformatics, where the goal is to identify similarities or common patterns shared by multiple strings. The primary objective of the LCP algorithm is to determine the longest contiguous sequence of characters that occurs at the beginning of each given string. In other words, it involves finding the longest string that serves as a prefix for all the input strings.
The LCP algorithm can be efficiently implemented by iterating through the characters of the input strings while comparing their characters at each position. The algorithm begins by initializing a variable to store the longest common prefix, typically with the value of the first string in the set. Then, it iterates through the remaining strings and compares their characters at each position with the characters of the current longest common prefix. If a mismatch is found, the algorithm truncates the longest common prefix to the length of the current matching characters, and proceeds to the next string. The process continues until all input strings have been examined, and the longest common prefix is returned as the final output. This approach ensures that the algorithm has a linear time complexity with respect to the total length of the input strings, making it an efficient solution for large-scale problems.
class Solution {
public:
string longestCommonPrefix(vector<string> &strs) {
if (strs.empty()) {
return string();
}
for (int i = 0; i < strs[0].size(); i++) {
for (int j = 1; j < strs.size(); j++) {
if (i == strs[j].size()) {
return strs[j];
} else if (i < strs[j].size() && strs[0][i] != strs[j][i]) {
return strs[j].substr(0, i);
}
}
}
return strs[0];
}
};
