How to concatenate strings based on overlap in R?

Question

I have three diferent strings that match and overlap along the caracteres

a = 'ABCDEF'
b = 'DEFGHI'
c = 'FGHIJK'

How can I combine these strings to have this output?

match
[1] 'ABCDEFGHIJK'

Can you be more explicit about the logic? If you input is a = 'ABCDEF' and b = 'GHIDEF', what would you expect the output to be? (i.e. what exactly is meant by "overlap"?) — IceCreamToucan
– IceCreamToucan, Commented Feb 1, 2021 at 22:24
Hello! Imagine that strings a, b and c are substrings and obbey that exact and specific order. By overlap I meant intersection, characters in common in a unique sense. For example, a and b overlap by "DEF", b and c overlap by "FGHI", and, if we sobrepose them, they form 'ABCDEFGHIJK'. Your example will result in none output (a = 'ABCDEF' and b = 'GHIDEF'), because they don't overlap. I want to combine them from left to right. — sciencenmagic
– sciencenmagic, Commented Feb 2, 2021 at 17:53

tmfmnk · Accepted Answer · 2021-02-01 22:19:47Z

1

One option could be:

paste(Reduce(union, sapply(list(a, b, c), strsplit, "")), collapse = "")

[1] "ABCDEFGHIJK"

answered Feb 1, 2021 at 22:19

tmfmnk

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