Hello String-matching Monks,

Here is the problem:

I have string such as

xyz123abc

which I need to look for in a file. However, the string in the file may contain one or more period characters, e.g.

xyz123abc

or

xy.z123abc

or

xyz1.23.abc

The only approach that occured to me was to create all the possible strings by inserting periods and then look for the generated strings. This is obviously going to scale badly for long strings.

Can anyone think of a smarter way of addressing the problem?

Thanks,

loris

"It took Loris ten minutes to eat a satsuma . . . twenty minutes to get from one end of his branch to the other . . . and an hour to scratch his bottom. But Slow Loris didn't care. He had a secret . . ."

In reply to Matching strings differing by a number of periods by loris

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