Leetcode | Sort Characters By Frequency (按照字符出现次数对字符串排序)

Description:

Given a string, sort it in decreasing order based on the frequency of characters.

Example:

Input: “tree”
Output: “eert”
Explanation:
‘e’ appears twice while ‘r’ and ‘t’ both appear once.
So ‘e’ must appear before both ‘r’ and ‘t’. Therefore “eetr” is also a valid answer.

Input: “cccaaa”

Output: “cccaaa”

Explanation:
Both ‘c’ and ‘a’ appear three times, so “aaaccc” is also a valid answer.
Note that “cacaca” is incorrect, as the same characters must be together.

Ideas:

	Reference the point from "Top K Frequent Elements",a large top heap is used by converting 
freq to negative.
	We can also use dict to keep char in s and its frequence, then sort dict in descending order.

Code:

# dict sort
class Solution(object):
    def frequencySort(self, s):
        """
        :type s: str
        :rtype: str
        """
        s_list = list(s)
        res = {}
        for i in s_list:
            res[i] = res[i]+1 if i in res else 1
        new_res = sorted(res.items(), key= lambda x:x[1], reverse=True)
        new_s = ''.join([(freq) * c for freq, c in new_res])

        return new_s

Execution times：40 ms
Memory consumption：16.4 MB

# large top heap
class Solution(object):
    def frequencySort(self, s):
    """
    :type s: str
    :rtype: str
    """
    import heapq as hq
    s_list = list(s)
    heap = []
    sort_ = collections.Counter(s_list)
    for c, freq in sort_.items():
        hq.heappush(heap, (-freq, c))
    new_s = ''.join([(-freq) * c for freq, c in heap])

    retuen new_s