Finding the Longest Common Prefix Among Strings

Given a collection of strings, your task is to find the longest common prefix string that is a prefix of all strings in the collection. This is a fundamental string manipulation problem with applications in text editors, file system searching, and data compression.

Problem Description

You will be provided with an array (or list) of strings. Your goal is to identify and return the longest string that appears at the beginning of every string in the input array.

Key Requirements:

• The output must be a string.
• If there is no common prefix among the strings, return an empty string.
• The comparison should be case-sensitive.

Expected Behavior:

• If the input array is empty, you should handle this gracefully (consider it an edge case).
• If the input array contains only one string, that string itself is the longest common prefix.

Edge Cases to Consider:

• An empty input array.
• An input array containing empty strings.
• An input array where all strings are identical.
• An input array where the common prefix is very short (e.g., a single character or empty).

Examples

Example 1:

Input: ["flower", "flow", "flight"]
Output: "fl"
Explanation: The strings "flower", "flow", and "flight" all start with "fl". "flo" is not a prefix of "flight".

Example 2:

Input: ["dog", "racecar", "car"]
Output: ""
Explanation: There is no common prefix among these strings.

Example 3:

Input: ["apple"]
Output: "apple"
Explanation: When there's only one string, it is its own longest common prefix.

Example 4:

Input: ["", "b"]
Output: ""
Explanation: One of the strings is empty, so there can be no common prefix other than an empty string.

Constraints

• The input array will contain between 0 and 200 strings, inclusive.
• Each string in the input array will contain between 0 and 200 characters, inclusive.
• All strings will consist of only lowercase English letters.
• The length of the returned common prefix string will not exceed the length of the shortest string in the input array.

Notes

Consider how you might compare strings character by character. Think about what happens when you reach the end of any of the input strings. You might find it helpful to iterate through the characters of one of the strings and compare them against the corresponding characters in all other strings.