LintCode 79. Longest Common Substring (DP经典题)

79. Longest Common Substring
    中文English
    Given two strings, find the longest common substring.

Return the length of it.

Example
Example 1:
Input: “ABCD” and “CBCE”
Output: 2

Explanation:
Longest common substring is "BC"

Example 2:
Input: “ABCD” and “EACB”
Output: 1

Explanation: 
Longest common substring is 'A' or 'C' or 'B'

Challenge
O(n x m) time and memory.

Notice
The characters in substring should occur continuously in original string. This is different with subsequence.

解法1：DP。
DP[i][j]代表以A[i-1]和B[j-1]结尾的LCS。
注意：

1. 不要跟Longest Common Subsequence那题混淆。那题的Subsequence之间可以有间隔，所以要考虑DP[i-1][j]和DP[i][j-1]。
2. 这里要用result保存最大值，而Longest Common Subsequence那题最后返回DP[M][N]即可。
3. if的else分支不需要，因为DP[i][j]缺省值为0。
4. DP[][] 的维数为M+1和N+1。

代码如下：

class Solution {
public:
    /**
     * @param A: A string
     * @param B: A string
     * @return: the length of the longest common substring.
     */
    int longestCommonSubstring(string &A, string &B) {
        int M = A.size();
        int N = B.size();
        if (M == 0 || N == 0) return 0;
        
        vector<vector<int>> DP(M + 1, vector<int>(N + 1, 0));
        int result = 0;

        for (int i = 1; i <= M; ++i) {
            for (int j = 1; j <= N; ++j) {
                if (A[i - 1] == B[j - 1]) {
                    DP[i][j] = DP[i - 1][j - 1] + 1;
                    result = max(result, DP[i][j]);
                } //else {
                //    DP[i][j] = 0;
                //} 
                
            }
        }
        
        return result;
    }
};