You're given a set of symbols for the elements in the periodic table [.... Li, Be, B, C, N, F, Ne, Na, Co, Ni, Cu, Ga, Al, Si.....]

Write the function breakingBad(name, symbols) that given a name and a set of symbols returns the phrase with the following format [Symbol]rest of the word

Example:
symbols = [H, He, Li, Be, B, C, N, F, Ne, Na, Co, Ni, Cu, Ga, Al, Si, Fa]
breakingBad("henry alba", symbols) results in [He]nry [Al]ba

Follow up: we only care about the longest symbol within a word. Example in the word henry there are two elements that are present [H] & [He] and we want He in the output phrase and not H.

I am wondering how you would approach this problem?

My attempt to solving this during the interview was:

1. Put the symbols in a set for constant lookup time.
2. Find the maxLen of any symbol.
3. Break up the given string into multiple words (the only delimiter will be a blank space)
4. For each word look for the maxLen substring and then recurse on that substring with maxLen - 1 till maxLen == 0; and do that for each substring that can be formed.

This seems like a brute force approach to me, I am wondering how best to optimize it which is why I am writing this post.

P.S. I found it hard. I am curious to know what your thoughts are?