compression of strings into curly braces

People when authoring technical papers often write things like:

email: {foo,bar}@domain.edu

If I'm in the bash shell on unix, I might write this snippet check a
bunch of hostnames for their system load, e.g.

for host in host{1,2,3}; do rsh $host uptime; done

so this brace usage is very expressive and convenient and easy to use
to expand a string into a set of related members. I'm currently
interested in going the other direction. e.g. given a list of strings
like

host1.domain.com
host2.domain.com
host3.domain.com

as input to a program, how is it possible to turn this into
host{1,2,3}.domain.com? it would seem that this really requires a
compression algorithm. ultimately with this transformation you are
run-length encoding, as plain text, contiguous stretches of multiple
elements which are similar, while the variances are grouped into sets
with curly braces (we can assume there are no { } or , characters in
the input, so they can be used to represent sets).

Has anyone seen this problem before? Does it have a name? In this
case, I am indeed looking to compress a list of hostnames into a short
but readable list, but would enjoy looking at a general solution. note
it gets trickier if you get this set as input:

host1.domain1.com
host2.domain1.com
host3.domain1.com
host1.mydomain2.com
host2.mydomain2.com
host3.mydomain2.com

in this case, the 2 obvious groups differ in multiple places so it
seems you need as output:

host{1,2,3}.domain1.com host{1,2,3}.mydomain2.com

but the set

host1.domain1.com
host2.domain1.com
host3.domain1.com
host1.domain2.com
host2.domain2.com
host3.domain2.com

can be turned into host{1,2,3}.domain{1,2}.com

thanks for any insight or recognition of this problem. or pointers to
libraries or algorithms which have solved this.

.

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