Longest property-preserved common factor: A new string-processing framework

Abstract We introduce a new family of string processing problems. Given two or more strings, we are asked to compute a factor common to all strings that preserves a specific property and has maximal length. We consider three fundamental string properties: square-free factors, periodic factors, and palindromic factors under three 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 online queries: given a 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 ′ ≤ k and we are asked to find a longest periodic factor common to at least k ′ strings. In the third one, we are given two strings and we are asked to find a longest palindromic factor common to the two strings. We present linear-time solutions for all settings. This is a full and extended version of a paper from SPIRE 2018.