The contribution of this article is twofold. First, it presents an encoding approach for seamless bidirectional transitions between localist and distributed representation domains. Second, the approach is demonstrated on the example of using Vector Symbolic Architecture for solving a problem of finding common substrings. The proposed algorithm uses elementary operations on long binary vectors. For the case of two patterns with respective lengths L1 and L2 it requires Θ(L1 + L2 – 1) operations on binary vectors, which is equal to the suffix trees approach – the fastest algorithm for this problem. The simulation results show that in order to be robustly detected by the proposed approach the length of a common substring should be more than 4% of the longest pattern.