Find largest word in dictionary by deleting some characters of given string

Find largest word in dictionary by deleting some characters of given string

Giving a dictionary and a string ‘str’, find the longest string in dictionary which can be formed by deleting some characters of the given ‘str’

Input : dict = {"ale", "apple", "monkey", "plea"}   
        str = "abpcplea"  
Output : apple 

This problem reduces to finding if a string is subsequence of another string or not. We traverse all dictionary words and for every word, we check if it is subsequence of given string and is largest of all such words. We finally return the longest word with given string as subsequence.

// Returns true if str1[] is a subsequence of str2[].

// m is length of str1 and n is length of str2

bool isSubSequence(string str1, string str2)

{

    int m = str1.length(), n = str2.length();

    int j = 0; // For index of str1 (or subsequence

    // Traverse str2 and str1, and compare current

    // character of str2 with first unmatched char

    // of str1, if matched then move ahead in str1

    for (int i=0; i<n&&j<m; i++)

        if (str1[j] == str2[i])

            j++;

    // If all characters of str1 were found in str2

    return (j==m);

}

// Returns the longest string in dictionary which is a

// subsequence of str.

string findLongestString(vector <string > dict, string str)

{

    string result = "";

    int length = 0;

    // Traverse through all words of dictionary

    for (string word : dict)

    {

        // If current word is subsequence of str and is largest

        // such word so far.

        if (length < word.length() && isSubSequence(word, str))

        {

            result = word;

            length = word.length();

        }

    }

    // Return longest string

    return result;

}

Longest Common Subsequence
Find largest word in dictionary by deleting some characters of given string