Longest Property-Preserved Common Factor

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a new family of string processing problems. We are given two or more strings and we are asked to compute a factor common to all strings that preserves a specific property and has maximal length. Here we consider two fundamental string properties: square-free factors and periodic factors under two different settings, one per property. In the first setting, we are given a string x and we are asked to construct a data structure over x answering the following type of on-line queries: given string y, find a longest square-free factor common to x and y. In the second setting, we are given k strings and an integer \(1 < k'\le k\) and we are asked to find a longest periodic factor common to at least \(k'\) strings. We present linear-time solutions for both settings. We anticipate that our paradigm can be extended to other string properties.