Shortest superstring
Given exactly two lowercase strings a and b, return the shortest string that contains both a and b as substrings, maximizing their overlap. If neither is a substring of the other, merge them on their largest overlap (a's suffix with b's prefix, or b's suffix with a's prefix), choosing whichever yields the shorter result; ties may return either valid superstring. Lengths up to a few hundred.
Implement
shortest_superstring_two(a: str, b: str) → strExamples
in
["abc","cde"]out"abcde"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.
0:00 of about 30 min
solution.py
InputExpectedGot
["abc","cde"]"abcde"not run yetsample