Finding the shortest repetitive pattern in a string

Question

I was wondering if there was a way to do pattern matching in Octave / matlab? I know Maple 10 has commands to do this but not sure what I need to do in Octave / Matlab. So

Answer 1

Another approach is as follows:

1. determine length of string, and find all possible factors of the string length value
2. for each possible factor length, reshape the string and check for a repeated substring

To find all possible factors, see this solution on SO. The next step can be performed in many ways, but I implement it in a simple loop, starting with the smallest factor length.

function repeat = repeats_in_string(str);
ns = numel(str);
nf = find(rem(ns, 1:ns) == 0);
for ii=1:numel(nf)
    repeat = str(1:nf(ii));
    if all(ismember(reshape(str,nf(ii),[])',repeat)); 
        break;
    end
end