Thank you, that is what I was looking for!

It only needs a test for equality at the beginning to behave the same. Otherwise there is no match and pos() will return undef, which will generate the relevant warning and a zero $i. (A test on the match could also resolve this.)

Plus, doing it this way makes a separate routine to find the common path redundant for the purposes of generating relative paths, as there are no byte/character issues.

In fact, the use bytes was only needed to determine $len0 and $len1, and should have been enclosed: do{use bytes;length $string;} is recommended in the camel book.

Some comments on what I meant by efficient...

Needless to say that my program will spend most of its life busy with filesystem interaction, and there isn't much that can be done in this area. In fact, any improvement on the relative path generation may not even be noticed when doing a recursive: fixlinks /

My first implementation used split() in a similar way to the answer given above by Moron. But I wasn't happy with the need to change the structure of the arguments data; i.e. if I receive scalars and compute another scalar, there must be a very good reason to transform the arguments into lists!

In my opinion this is a reasonable concern, that is only about taking care in the solution to a given problem. (Maybe I should state that I have never been a C programmer.) Anyway, this got me thinking about the way coreutils/lib/canonicalize.c does things, and took me to a use bytes solution.

If I wasn't under the wrong impression that substr() was expensive, I could have written a solution like the method by salva, and after time might have remembered bisection. (The irony being that one is generating a list of numbers that converge to the desired position.)

Still, the xor approach by Corion is the best. As you say there is no good reason to use bytes, it is just a case (for me, very instructional) when a binary operation helps processing strings.

Regards to All!

In reply to Re^2: Common Substrings by Anonymous Monk
in thread Common Substrings by Anonymous Monk

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