Computing All The Possible Substrings of a Given String

algorithm, permutation, pseudocode, string, substring

Solution

Just use two for-loops:

generate substrings(string):
    for start in [0,1,...,string.length-1]:
        for end in [start,...,string.length-1]:
            yield string[start...end]

You can also do it this way with two for-loops:

generate substrings(string):
    for substringLength in [1,2,...,string.length]:
        for start in range [0,1,...,string.length-substringLength]:
            yield string[start...(start+substringLength-1)]
    yield ""

You probably want to include the empty string `""` in the sequence you return as well, as it is a substring of all strings.

You also need to consider if it is valid to yield a duplicate string multiple times (e.g. do you return "ABA" twice as a substring of "ABABA"?). If the answer is no, merely make a hashtable called `alreadyYielded`, and whenever you yield, abort if you've already yielded the string, otherwise add the value to the hashtable in case you see it again. For example:

seen = new HashTable()
...
        substring = string[...]
        if substring not in seen:
            seen.add(substring)
            yield substring
...

Problem

Original source

Related problems

• Finding all the subsets of a set
• How to find all substrings of a string in PHP
• How to find all substrings of a string in PHP