Showing posts with label Common Permutation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Common Permutation. Show all posts

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Common Permutation

This problem is from the book Programming Challenges. Here is the problem's description.

Given two strings a and b, print the longest string x of letters such that there is a
permutation of x that is a subsequence of a and there is a permutation of x that is a
subsequence of b.

Input
The input file contains several cases, each case consisting of two consecutive lines. This
means that lines 1 and 2 are a test case, lines 3 and 4 are another test case, and so on.
Each line contains one string of lowercase characters, with first line of a pair denoting
a and the second denoting b. Each string consists of at most 1,000 characters.

Output
For each set of input, output a line containing x. If several x satisfy the criteria above,
choose the first one in alphabetical order.

Sample Input
pretty
women
walking
down
the
street

Sample Output
e
nw
et

Here is my solution in C#.