1. A method for reconstructing character values of a message string given a plurality of strings comprising characters, the method comprising: providing a processing device for implementing the following steps: (A) identifying common strings of characters between pairs of strings selected from the plurality of strings, including, for a pair of strings, determining a longest common subsequence of characters between a first string and a second string; (B) identifying similarity measures between the pairs of strings, including, for a pair of strings: (i) calculating a first similarity value weight between the first string and the second string; (ii) identifying a first set of character positions in the first string that represent the characters in the longest common subsequence; and (iii) identifying a second set of character positions in the second string that represent the characters in the longest common subsequence; and (C) for a location of the message string, determining a reconstructed character value based on a set of candidate character values and a set of exclusion character values and their associated weights obtained using the similarity measures between the pairs of strings, including: updating a set of candidate character values by removing any character values that also are included in a set of exclusion character values; responsive to the updated set of candidate character values containing at least one character value, determining the reconstructed character value by selecting a candidate character value associated with a largest similarity value weight of the similarity value weights associated with the candidate character values in the updated set of candidate character values; responsive to the updated set of candidate character values being an empty set and the set of exclusion character values containing at least one character value, determining the reconstructed character value by selecting an exclusion character value associated with a largest similarity value weight of the similarity value weights associated with the exclusion character values in the set of exclusion character values; and responsive to the updated set of candidate character values and the set of exclusion character values both being empty sets, assigning a character value to the reconstructed character value.