5. Longest Palindromic Substring

Given a string s, find the longest palindromic substring in s. You may assume that the maximum length of s is 1000.

Example:

Input: "babad"

Output: "bab"

Note: "aba" is also a valid answer.

Example:

Input: "cbbd"

Output: "bb"

Solution:

Tips:

1. palindromic has 2 cases, one is odd, the other is even.

2. we can judge these 2 cases from middle to the sides.

Java Codes:

public class Solution {
    public String longestPalindrome(String s) {
        if (1 == s.length()) {
            return s;
        }

        // for odd
        int maxLen = 0, leftIdx = 0;
        for (int i = 1; i < s.length(); i++) {
            int left = i - 1;
            int right = i;

            while (left >= 0 && right < s.length()) {
                if (s.charAt(left) != s.charAt(right)) {
                    break;
                }
                left--;
                right++;
            }
            if (maxLen < right - left - 1) {
                maxLen = right - left - 1;
                leftIdx = left + 1;
            }
        }

        if (s.length() < 3) {
            return s.substring(leftIdx, leftIdx + maxLen);
        }
        // for even
        for (int i = 1; i < s.length() - 1; i++) {
            int left = i - 1;
            int right = i + 1;

            while (left >= 0 && right < s.length()) {
                if (s.charAt(left) != s.charAt(right)) {
                    break;
                }
                left--;
                right++;
            }
            if (maxLen < right - left - 1) {
                maxLen = right - left - 1;
                leftIdx = left + 1;
            }
        }

        return s.substring(leftIdx, leftIdx + maxLen); 
    }
}