CodingHardcod-g804

Subject Suffix structuresLevel Senior–Staff~35 minCommon in Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development

Question

Given two lowercase strings a and b, return the length of their longest common substring (a contiguous run appearing in both). Strings are up to a few thousand characters. Return 0 if there is no common substring.

Implement

longest_common_substring(a: str, b: str) → int

Examples

in["abcde","zbcdf"]out3

What a strong answer looks like

State your approach and its time/space complexity out loud before you optimize. Handle the edge cases (empty input, duplicates, overflow), and say why you chose this over the brute force. Green tests are the floor, not the grade.

Learn the concepts

Vibe coding: describe the solution in plain language (or narrate it) and the coach grades your approach. Generating runnable code from your description is coming next.

Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.