Python - difference between two strings

Question

I\'d like to store a lot of words in a list. Many of these words are very similar. For example I have word afrykanerskojęzyczny and many of words like afr

Answer 1

What you are asking for is a specialized form of compression. xdelta3 was designed for this particular kind of compression, and there's a python binding for it, but you could probably get away with using zlib directly. You'd want to use zlib.compressobj and zlib.decompressobj with the zdict parameter set to your "base word", e.g. afrykanerskojęzyczny.

Caveats are zdict is only supported in python 3.3 and higher, and it's easiest to code if you have the same "base word" for all your diffs, which may or may not be what you want.