121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock Python3

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 (ie, buy one and sell one share of the stock), design an algorithm to find the maximum profit.

假设你有一个数组，其中i元素是给定股票在第一天的价格。
如果你只允许最多完成一个交易（即买入一个股票，卖出一份股票），设计一个最大利润的算法。

Example 1:

Input: [7, 1, 5, 3, 6, 4]
Output: 5

max. difference = 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

In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

动态规划问题，

头脑中只出现了nlog(n)的普通方法，如下：

class Solution:
    def maxProfit(self, prices):
        """
        :type prices: List[int]
        :rtype: int
        """
        len_p = len(prices)
        #if prices[0] == max(prices):
          #  return 0
        m = 0
        for i in range(len_p):
            for j in range(i, len_p):
                if prices[j] - prices[i] >m:
                     m = prices[j] - prices[i]
        return m

却被报错运行超时。。。。

后来整理思路，代码如下：

class Solution:
    def maxProfit(self, prices):
        """
        :type prices: List[int]
        :rtype: int
        """
        len_p = len(prices)
        if len_p <=1:
            return 0
        buy_price = prices[0]
        max_price = 0
        for i in range(1, len_p):
            buy_price = min(buy_price, prices[i])
            max_price = max(max_price, prices[i] - buy_price)
        return max_price