Re: Re: Find common prefix from a list of strings

[Albannach]

Drat! Thanks for the reality check - the die was just there for testing, I should have taken it out as it does not add anything, similarly the for was a hold over from an earlier attempt. I've got to proof read my posts more!

You obviously have the same must-be-a-better-way (MBABW?) feeling, and I like the idea of the grep trick, though I must admit I usually have a fear of labels. Anyway your code will work with a few minor fixes:

my $s;
LIST:
for my $len ( 1..length $files[0]) {
  $s = substr($files[0],0,$len - 1);
  last LIST unless (scalar grep { /^$s/ } @files) == @files;
}
chop $s;
print "prefix: $s\n";

Update: Not silly at all bobn, I should really have specified that an empty string is the correct answer for no common prefix - thanks for pointing that out.

--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

[bobn]

Actually, there's one other "bug" - if there are never any matches, I will print out that the prefix is '' - well actually, as a zero-length string, that's actually not untrue, but still silly.

--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com

[bobn]

Loved your chop $s; - it's the easiest and coolest way to deal with the "I found the condition that makes me stop, but i already added one too many characters" - in fact, I've used it that way myself.

--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com