[LeetCode121]Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

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

If you were only permitted to complete at most one transaction (ie, buy one and sell one share of the stock), design an algorithm to find the maximum profit.

Example 1:

Input: [7, 1, 5, 3, 6, 4]
Output: 5

max. difference = 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

In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

用两个变量分别表示最小买入价格和最大利润，将最大利润初始化为0，最小买入价格初始化为第一天的价格，从左往右扫描数组，如果当前价格比最小买入价格低，则最小买入价格更新为当前价格，如果当前价格与最小买入价格之差大于最大利润，则最大利润更新为当前价格与最小买入价格之差，将数组扫描一遍之后，最大利润即为所求结果。算法的时间复杂度为O(n)。

class Solution {
public:
    int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
        if(prices.empty())
        {
            return 0;
        }
        int n=prices.size();
        int maP=0,mi=prices[0];
        for(int i=0;i<n;i++)
        {
            if(prices[i]-mi<=0)
            {
                mi=prices[i];
            }
            if(prices[i]-mi>maP)
            {
                maP=prices[i]-mi;
            }
        }
        return maP;
    }
};