Magical usage of Bitwise operators - Get optimized solutions for many arithmatic problems
Introduction I will list some of the interesting usage of bitwise operators…
October 01, 2020
Implement an algorithm to determine if a string has all the characters as unique.
Lets try to understand the problem first. Always clear out the doubts. Clear about the character set, is it ASCII or what. Before moving on to the solution, declare your input points. Example: you are considering only lower case alphabets.
A very simple solution can be to use a HashSet
and just check if you found a character or not. If not, then save it.
At any point, if you found a character exists in your HashSet
, return false.
public boolean isUnique(String str) {
Set<Character> set = new HashSet<>();
for (int i=0; i<str.length(); i++) {
if (set.contains(str.charAt(i))) {
return false;
}
set.add(str.charAt(i));
}
return true;
}
The complexity of this solution would be O(n)
Clear out from your interviewer the size of your input set. It can be 256 cgaracters or 26 characters. For this solution, lets assume characters to be 256.
We can then take a boolean array of size 256, where each index represents a character position. On finding a character, set it to true.
public boolean isUnique2(String str) {
if (str.length() > 256) {
//means at least one character is coming more than once
return false;
}
boolean chars[] = new boolean[256];
for (int i=0; i<str.length(); i++) {
if (chars[str.charAt(i)]) {
return false;
}
chars[str.charAt(i)] = true;
}
//did not find any duplicate
return true;
}
The complexity is also O(n)
For this solution, lets assume we have all lower-case letters. Hence, we have 26 characters in total.
We can take an Integer
variable which takes 4 bytes = 32 bits
. Which can help us in representing 26 characters and will be out Bit Vector.
public boolean isUnique_BitVector(String str) {
if (str.length() >= 26) {
return false;
}
int bit_vector = 0;
for (int i=0; i<str.length(); i++) {
int charVal = str.charAt(i) - 'a';
int shiftedVal = 1 << charVal;
if ((bit_vector & shiftedVal) > 0) {
return false;
}
bit_vector |= shiftedVal;
}
return true;
}
In above solution:
val - 'a'
. Example, for character: b
we will get index=1.achc
Assumming last 1 byte of bit vector (8 bits)
Initial bit vector: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
For 'a': charVal=0, 1 << 0 = 1
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 & 1 = 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 1 = 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
For 'c': charVal=2, 1 << 2 = 1 0 0
(0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0) & (1 0 0) = 0
(0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0) | (1 0 0) = (0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0)
For 'h': charVal=7, 1 << 7 = (1 0 0 0 0 0 0)
(0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0) & (1 0 0 0 0 0 0) = 0
(0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0) | (1 0 0 0 0 0 0) = (0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0)
For 'c': charVal=2, 1 << 2 = (1 0 0)
(0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0) & (1 0 0) = 1
Found > 0, return false
Its O(n)
Introduction I will list some of the interesting usage of bitwise operators…
Problem Statement You are given a rows x cols matrix grid. Initially, you are…
Problem Statement Given a linked list, remove the n-th node from the end of list…
Here are some tips while giving your coding interviews. 1. Never try to jump to…
** Inversion There is an array(a) and two indexes i and j. Inversion is the…
Max Priority Queue is a data structure which manage a list of keys(values). And…
Introduction In this post we will see following: How to schedule a job on cron…
Introduction There are some cases, where I need another git repository while…
Introduction In this post, we will see how to fetch multiple credentials and…
Introduction I have an automation script, that I want to run on different…
Introduction I had to write a CICD system for one of our project. I had to…
Introduction Java log4j has many ways to initialize and append the desired…