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Challenges

Merge two strings

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Challenge

Given two strings a and b, return the shortest string s so that s starts with a and ends with b.

(Inspired by https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/57816868#57816868 )

Examples

'ABCDEF', 'EFGHI' -> 'ABCDEFGHI'
'AAAAAA', 'AAAAAAAA' -> 'AAAAAAAA'
'ABC', '123' -> 'ABC123'
'', 'ABCDE' -> 'ABCDE'
'ABCD', 'ABCD' -> 'ABCD'
'', '' -> ''

Brownie points for beating my 26 in APL.

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3 comment threads

What characters are allowed? (1 comment)
Can I take input in reverse order? (1 comment)
General comments (2 comments)

8 answers

+5
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APL(Dyalog Unicode), 26 bytes SBCS

{⊃x/⍨⊃¨⍺∘⍷¨x←,∘⍵¨(⊂⍬),,\⍺}

Try it on APLgolf!

A dfn submission which takes the inputs as left and right argument.

I took way too long to come up with this. Fun challenge.

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+4
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Sed -E, 25 bytes

Takes second input, , comma, first input (inputs cannot contain , commas).

s/^(.*)(.*),(.*)\1$/\3\2/
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You might want to verify that that input format is acceptable. (1 comment)
+4
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BQN, 18 bytesSBCS

{⊑(⊑𝕨⊸⍷)¨⊸/∾⟜𝕩¨↑𝕨}

Run online!

A direct translation of Razetime's APL solution (my attempted improvement ⊣∾{⊢´/𝕨⊸«⊸≡¨↑𝕩}↓⊢ turns out to be not at all correct).

The BQN solution is much shorter mainly because it has Prefixes () built in. Being able to filter with ⊸/ (see Before) also helps a lot.

{⊑(⊑𝕨⊸⍷)¨⊸/∾⟜𝕩¨↑𝕨}  # Function with left argument 𝕨 and right argument 𝕩
               ↑𝕨   # All prefixes of 𝕨
           ∾⟜𝕩¨     # Append 𝕩 after each one
         ⊸/         # Filter by...
  (    )¨           #   On each string,
    𝕨⊸⍷             #     Where does 𝕨 appear as a substring?
   ⊑                #     But I only care if it's the first one
 ⊑                  # Then take the first

Put together, the pattern ⊑𝕨⊸⍷ tests if 𝕨 is a prefix of the argument.

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+2
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Jelly, 13 bytes

W;;Ƥ@ḣL}¹⁼ʋƇḢ

Try it online!

Takes the two strings as arguments in reverse order.

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Japt -h, 13 12 9 bytes

à m+V kbU

Try it

à m+V kbU     :Implicit input of strings U & V
à             :Combinations of U
  m           :Map
   +V         :  Append V
      k       :Filter elements that return falsey (i.e., 0)
       bU     :  First 0-based index of U
              :Implicit output of last element
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+1
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Python 3, 82 81 bytes

lambda a,b:[a[:i]+b for i in range(len(a)+2)if i>len(a)or b[:len(a)-i]==a[i:]][0]

Try it online!

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Vyxal, 1 byte

Try it Online!

Builtin be like

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Ruby, 40 bytes

f=->a,b{b.index(a)==0?b:a[/./m]+f[$',b]}

Attempt This Online!

If we could assume that string contains only letters and numbers (or to be more specific, no characters like \t\n\v\f\r \#$()*+-.?[\\]^{|}) then it could be improved to 36 bytes:

f=->a,b{b=~/^#{a}/?b:a[/./]+f[$',b]}

Attempt This Online!

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