I recently was asked essentially this question in an interview: given a string S and a set of strings P, can the strings from P be concatenated with repetitions to form S? Or put another way, can strings from P with repetitions cover S without overlaps?
My first instinct was to use suffix tries and an overlap graph, but the solution that we eventually reached used no sophisticated data structures, just the array of strings and some recursion in a divide and conquer approach. Here’s my extended thoughts on the problem.