LeetCode: Longest Common Prefix

Write a function to find the longest common prefix string amongst an array of strings.

If there is no common prefix, return an empty string “”.

Example 1:

Input: ["flower","flow","flight"]
Output: "fl"

Example 2:

Input: ["dog","racecar","car"]
Output: ""
Explanation: There is no common prefix among the input strings.

Note:

All given inputs are in lowercase letters a-z.

本题求最长的共同前缀，既然是前缀，问题就简单了，从第一个字符开始比较，相同的话就append，不同的话就结束并返回。不过依然要注意以下几点

1. 选取最短的字符串进行遍历，以免出现index out of range的情况
2. 判断特殊情况，比如空数组，或者存在空字符串

class Solution(object):
    def longestCommonPrefix(self, strs):
        """
        :type strs: List[str]
        :rtype: str
        """
        if not strs:
            return ''
        if '' in strs:
            return ''
        if len(strs) == 1:
            return strs[0]
        
        min_index = 0
        for i, v in enumerate(strs):
            if len(v) < len(strs[min_index]):
                min_index = i
                
        res = ''
        for i, v in enumerate(strs[min_index]):
            for item in strs:
                if item[i] != v:
                    return res
            res += v
            
        return res