121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

https://leetcode.com/problems/best-time-to-buy-and-sell-stock/

Description

Say you have an array for which the $i^{th}$ 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.

Solutions

思路：
将第一个元素标为min_element，指针向后移动，遍历整个数组，更新最小的元素值，记住最大那个差值。

Submissions

class Solution {
    public int maxProfit(int[] prices) {
        int minprice = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
        int maxprofit = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < prices.length; i++) {
            if (prices[i] < minprice)
                minprice = prices[i];
            else if (prices[i] - minprice > maxprofit)
                maxprofit = prices[i] - minprice;
        }
        return maxprofit;
    }
}

Summary

只需要遍历一遍，比brute force要好。