Match beginning of two strings

[Jim Richardson]

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On Sat, 02 Aug 2003 17:39:26 -0400,
 Ravi <rxs141 at cwru.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have about 200GB of data that I need to go through and extract the 
> common first part of a line. Something like this.
> 
> >>>a = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
> >>>b = "abcdefghijklmnopBHLHT"
> >>>c = extract(a,b)
> >>>print c
> "abcdefghijklmnop"
> 
> Here I want to extract the common string "abcdefghijklmnop". Basically I 
> need a fast way to do that for any two given strings. For my situation, 
> the common string will always be at the beginning of both strings. I can 
> use regular expressions to do this, but from what I understand there is 
> a lot of overhead. New data is being generated at the rate of about 1GB 
> per hour, so this needs to be reasonably fast while leaving CPU time for 
> other processes.
> 
> Thanks
> Ravi
> 

Are you trying to match any to any strings? or only a pair as above?


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-- 
Jim Richardson         http://www.eskimo.com/~warlock

Linux, because eventually, you grow up enough to be trusted with a fork()