finding common prefix of array of strings

Question

I have an array like this:

$sports = array(
\'Softball - Counties\',
\'Softball - Eastern\',
\'Softball - North Harbour\',
\'Softball - South\',
\'Softball -         


        

Answer 1

Probably there is some terribly well-regarded algorithm for this, but just off the top of my head, if you know your commonality is going to be on the left-hand side like in your example, you could do way better than your posted methodology by first finding the commonality of the first two strings, and then iterating down the rest of the list, trimming the common string as necessary to achieve commonality or terminating with failure if you trim all the way to nothing.