Shortest unique prefix - hack part #3
- I want to find the shortest unique prefix for each string in a vector (N < 20)
- i.e. in a vector of strings, what’s the shortest a string can be and still match only itself
- This isn’t a computational bottleneck in the overall process, so there’s no need for heroic/drastic solutions.
- I wasn’t going to write a trie implementation just to solve this problem.
Yesterday’s solution got a bit ugly.
Earlier today I got all cute using charmatch().
And now I’ve just discovered that there’s a function in base R that already does this. (Thanks to mdsummer for pointing this out)
Feeling a bit silly now.
abbreviate(c("ab", "apple", "apart", 'b', 'ag'), use.classes = FALSE, minlength = 1) ab apple apart b ag
"ab" "app" "apa" "b" "ag" abbreviate(c('blue', 'black', 'bold') , use.classes = FALSE, minlength = 1) blue black bold
"blu" "bla" "bo"