Girish Sahani schrieb: > Given a length k string,i want to search for 2 substrings (overlap > possible) in a list consisting of length k-1 strings. These 2 substrings > when 'united' give the original string. > e.g given 'abc' i want to search in the list of 2-length strings > ['ab',ac','cd','bc','bd'] to extract either > 1) 'ab and 'ac' OR ('a' common) > 2) 'ab' and 'bc' OR ('b' common) > 3) 'ac' and 'bc' ('c' common)
Here is a simple brute force solution that also works for different lengths of your strings: complete = 'abc' partial = ['ab','ac','cd','bc','bd'] for i1, s1 in enumerate(partial): for s2 in partial[i1+1:]: if set(s1).union(set(s2)) == set(complete): print s1, s2 -- Christoph -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list