Exploring left truncatable primes

Recently I came across a fascinating Numberphile video on truncatable primes

I immediately thought it would be cool to whip a quick Julia code to get the full enumeration of all left truncatable primes, count the number of branches and also get the largest left truncatable prime.

using Primes
 
function get_left_primes(s::String)
    p_arr=Array{String,1}()
    for i=1:9
        number_s="$i$s"
        if isprime(parse(BigInt, number_s))
            push!(p_arr,number_s)
        end
    end
    p_arr
end
 
function get_all_left_primes(l)
    r_l= Array{String,1}()
    n_end_points=0
    for i in l
        new_l=get_left_primes(i)
        isempty(new_l) && (n_end_points+=1)
        append!(r_l,new_l)
        next_new_l,new_n=get_all_left_primes(new_l)
        n_end_points+=new_n # counting the chains
        append!(r_l,next_new_l)
    end
    r_l, n
end

The first function just prepends a number (expressed in String for convenience) and checks for it possible primes that can emerge from a single digit prepending. For example:

julia> get_left_primes("17")
2-element Array{String,1}:
 "317"
 "617"

The second function, just makes extensive use of the first to get all left truncatable primes and also count the number of branches.

julia> all_left_primes, n_branches=get_all_left_primes([""])
(String["2", "3", "5", "7", "13", "23", "43", "53", "73", "83"  …  "6435616333396997", "6633396997", "76633396997", "963396997", "16396997", "96396997", "616396997", "916396997", "396396997", "4396396997"], 1442)
 
julia> n_branches
1442
 
julia> all_left_primes
4260-element Array{String,1}:
 "2"
 "3"
 "5"
 "7"
 "13"
 "23"
 ⋮
 "96396997"
 "616396997"
 "916396997"
 "396396997"
 "4396396997"

So we the full list of possible left truncatable primes with a length 4260. Also the total number of branches came to 1442.

We now get the largest left truncatable primes with the following one liner:

julia> largest_left_prime=length.(all_left_primes)|>indmax|> x->all_left_primes[x]
"357686312646216567629137"

After this fun exploration, I found an implementation in Julia for just getting the largest left truncatable prime for any base in Rosseta Code.