【LeetCode】买卖一次股票获得最大利润：Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

Say you have an array for which the ith element is the price of a given stock on day i.

If you were only permitted to complete at most one transaction (i.e., buy one and sell one share of the stock), design an algorithm to find the maximum profit.

Note that you cannot sell a stock before you buy one.

Example 1:

Input: [7,1,5,3,6,4]
Output: 5
Explanation: Buy on day 2 (price = 1) and sell on day 5 (price = 6), profit = 6-1 = 5.
             Not 7-1 = 6, as selling price needs to be larger than buying price.

Example 2:

Input: [7,6,4,3,1]
Output: 0
Explanation: In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

解题思路：

• 在某一天卖出股票时，这这一天之前股价的最低点买入，可以获得最大利润。因此，需要一个变量minValue，来保存遍历到当前元素i时，[0, i - 1]范围内的最小值；同时需要一个变量maxProfit来保存处理i元素前所能获得的最大利润，那么max(maxProfit, prices[i] - minValue)即为遍历到当前元素的最大利润，同时还需要更新minValue为min(minValue, prices[i]).
• 本题如果想清楚了，写代码非常简单。

class Solution {
public:
    int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
        int n = prices.size();
        if(n <= 1) return 0;
        
        int minValue = prices[0];
        int profit = 0;
        for(int i = 1; i < n; i++) {
            if(prices[i] - minValue > profit)
                profit = prices[i] - minValue;
            minValue = min(minValue, prices[i]);
        }
        
        return profit;
    }
};