leetcode 121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock 买卖股票的最好时间【easy】

题目：

Say you have an array for which the ith element is the price of a given stock on day i.

假设您有一个数组，其中第i个元素是第i天给定股票的价格。

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.

如果您只被允许完成最多一笔交易（即买入并卖出一股股票），请设计算法以找到最大利润。

Note that you cannot sell a stock before you buy one.

请注意，在购买之前不能出售股票。

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.

 

代码：

class Solution:
    def maxProfit(self, prices):
        """
        :type prices: List[int]
        :rtype: int
        """
        if len(prices) == 0:
            return 0
        maxProfit = 0
        minPrice = prices[0]
        for i in prices:
            if i < minPrice:
                minPrice = i
            elif i - minPrice > maxProfit:
                
                    maxProfit = i - minPrice
        return maxProfit

  思路：

           按照传统的两层for循环依次遍历效率太低而且会超时。这种方法只用到一次for循环就可以求解，需要两个变量，一个用来存储当前遍历的最小股票价格，另一个用来存储到目前为止后面集合中的数减去最小股票价格的最大利润值。最后返回最大利润值即可。