I am parsing the set of file merges and branches and finding the branching structure of the source archive. There could easily be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of these records that have to be parsed.

Well, how complicated is the branching structure, really? Is it something as simple as this? 

        - branch1 -
       /- branch2 -\
      /-- branch3 --\
 *** ---- branch4 ----[same sub-structure for all branches]
      \-- branch5 --/
       \- branch6 -/
        \   ...   /

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Or is it more complicated? Do some branches only contain one or another subset of the overall structure (branch FOO contains everything, but branch BAR only contains component X)? Or are there additional versioning branches at lower levels along some paths (branch FOO contains components X, Y and Z, but there are two versions of Y within FOO)?

If it's really as simple as my crude diagram, you only need to look for common strings from one direction (left-to-right, or "top-down"). If it's not that simple, you need to be a little more explicit about what you want to derive from the overall structure. What sort of representation for the (more complicated) branching structure would be desirable?

(Not in the sense of "tell us what you want so we can do it for you", but rather "make sure you really know what you want so you work on solving the right problems".)

In reply to Re^3: Selecting the difference between two strings by graff
in thread Selecting the difference between two strings by qazwart

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