Does anyone know of an R package that solves the longest common substring problem? I am looking for something fast that could work on vectors.
I don't know R, but I used to implement Hirschberg's algorithm which is fast and don't consume too much space.
As I remember it is only 2 or 3 recursively called short functions.
Here is a link: http://wordaligned.org/articles/longest-common-subsequence
So don't hesitate to implement it in R, it worths the effort since it is a very interesting algorithm.