" Personally I'd rather have easier to understand algorithms which are good enough rather than complex algorithms which can handle edge cases we haven't thought of. "
+1
"But, Longest Common Subsequence is not too difficult either. "
It seems pretty difficult to me! Maybe it's time I went back to university! :)

I would suggest that we just trim the options strings to the length of the lookup string, and then look for a match. Does that make sense? Then we just have to make sure that the option in the test is the shorter string.