LeetCode481. Magical String

A magical string S consists of only '1' and '2' and obeys the following rules:

The string S is magical because concatenating the number of contiguous occurrences of characters '1' and '2' generates the string S itself.

The first few elements of string S is the following: S = "1221121221221121122……"

If we group the consecutive '1's and '2's in S, it will be:

1 22 11 2 1 22 1 22 11 2 11 22 ......

and the occurrences of '1's or '2's in each group are:

1 2 2 1 1 2 1 2 2 1 2 2 ......

You can see that the occurrence sequence above is the S itself.

Given an integer N as input, return the number of '1's in the first N number in the magical string S.

Note: N will not exceed 100,000.

Example 1:

Input: 6
Output: 3
Explanation: The first 6 elements of magical string S is "12211" and it contains three 1's, so return 3.

参考资料：here。

class Solution {
public:
	int magicalString(int n) {
		if (n == 0) return 0;
		else if (n <= 3) return 1;

		int ans = 0, idx = 2;
		vector<int> l{ 1,2,2 };
		while (l.size() <= n) {
			int append_n = 3 - l.back();
			for (int i = 0; i < l[idx]; i++) {
				l.push_back(append_n);
			}
            idx++;
		}
		for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
			if (l[i] == 1) ans++;
		}
		return ans;
	}
};