A note on the longest common compatible prefix problem for partial words

For a partial word w the longest common compatible prefix of two positions i, j, denoted lccp(i, j), is the largest k such that w[i, i+k−1] ↑ w[j, j +k−1], where ↑ is the compatibility relation of partial words (it is not an equivalence relation). The LCCP problem is to preprocess a partial word in such a way that any query lccp(i, j) about this word can be answered in O(1) time. It is a natural generalization of the longest common prefix (LCP) problem for regular words, for which an O(n) preprocessing time and O(1) query time solution exists. Recently an efficient algorithm for this problem has been given by F. Blanchet-Sadri and J. Lazarow (LATA 2013). The preprocessing time was O(nh + n), where h is the number of " holes " in w. The algorithm was designed for partial words over a constant alphabet and was quite involved. We present a simple solution to this problem with slightly better runtime that works for any linearly-sortable alphabet. Our preprocessing is in time O(nµ + n), where µ is the number of blocks of holes in w. Our algorithm uses ideas from alignment algorithms and dynamic programming.