Given a collection of sequences, how do you filter them down to those that are the longest, or alternatively, the shortest given they have a common prefix? So given this collection of sequences: "a b c d e f", "a b c", "a b c d e", "u v", "u v w x", "u v w x y", "m n" filter to the longest: "a b c d e f", "u v w x y", "m n", and filter to the shortest: "a b c", "u v", "m n". I am hoping for code either in Python or C++. Is there an efficient algorithm out there for this problem?
All I can think of is, sort them based on length, then check if the second element in the list is a substring of the first element. If so, then remove it from the list. Then iterate through the list, in a similar manner filtering those out that are substrings of a longer sequence. Something in reverse to filter to the shorted sequences. But that doesn't feel like an efficient approach.