Implement strStr().
Return the index of the first occurrence of needle in haystack, or -1 if needle is not part of haystack.
Example 1:
Input: haystack = "hello", needle = "ll" Output: 2
Example 2:
Input: haystack = "aaaaa", needle = "bba" Output: -1
Clarification:
What should we return when needle
is an empty string? This is a great question to ask during an interview.
For the purpose of this problem, we will return 0 when needle
is an empty string. This is consistent to C's strstr() and Java's indexOf().
Well, the problem does not aim for an advanced algorithm like KMP but only a clean brute-force algorithm. So we can traverse all the possible starting points of haystack
(from 0
to haystack.length() - needle.length()
) and see if the following characters in haystack
match those of needle
.
The code is as follows.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
class Solution {
public:
int strStr(string haystack, string needle) {
int m = haystack.length(), n = needle.length();
if (!n) {
return 0;
}
for (int i = 0; i < m - n + 1; i++) {
int j = 0;
for (; j < n; j++) {
if (haystack[i + j] != needle[j]) {
break;
}
}
if (j == n) {
return i;
}
}
return -1;
}
};
int main()
{
string haystack = "hello";
string needle = "ll";
Solution m_sol;
cout<< m_sol.strStr(haystack, needle)<<endl;
return 0;
}
You may also make the codes shorter, and also, harder to understand :-)
class Solution {
public:
int strStr(string haystack, string needle) {
int m = haystack.length(), n = needle.length(), p = 0;
while (true) {
if (p + n > m + 1) {
return -1;
}
if (haystack.substr(p, n) == needle) {
return p;
}
while ((p++ < m - n + 1) && (haystack[p] != needle[0]));
}
}
};