Find the longest common starting substring in a set of strings [closed]

Answer 1

While reading these answers with all the fancy functional programming, sorting and regexes and whatnot, I just thought: what's wrong a little bit of C? So here's a goofy looking little program.

#include 

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
  int i = -1, j, c;

  if (argc < 2)
    return 1;

  while (c = argv[1][++i])
    for (j = 2; j < argc; j++)
      if (argv[j][i] != c)
        goto out;

 out:
  printf("Longest common prefix: %.*s\n", i, argv[1]);
}

Compile it, run it with your list of strings as command line arguments, then upvote me for using goto!