Comment on Retiring a Great Interview ProblemparentComments−qntm15yThis was actually going to be my solution as well. Regex engines are optimised for exactly this sort of problem, why duplicate the work manually?−saucetenuto15yrfumani gave one reason: it won't produce the right answer. Here's another: your regex engine will probably fall over dead if you ask it apply a million-word alternation.−eru15ygrep could be fine. I wouldn't trust backtracking regex engines, though.
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This was actually going to be my solution as well. Regex engines are optimised for exactly this sort of problem, why duplicate the work manually?
rfumani gave one reason: it won't produce the right answer. Here's another: your regex engine will probably fall over dead if you ask it apply a million-word alternation.
grep could be fine. I wouldn't trust backtracking regex engines, though.