121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

leetcode 121

Say you have an array for which the i^th element is the price of a given stock on dayi.

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.

题意：一个数组中的第i个元素表示在第i天的股票价格。如果只进行一次交易，即买一次股票并卖出，设计算法找到最大收益并返回最大收益值。

解题思路：指针i遍历数组读取当天股票价格，min记录在此之前股票的最低价格，计算出以当天出售股票时的收益。直至遍历完数组，得到最大收益。

class Solution {
public:
    int maxProfit(vector<int>& prices) {
		if(prices.size()==0)
			return 0;
		int min=prices[0];//记录最低的股票价格
		int maxP=0;//记录收益
                for(int i=1;i<prices.size();i++)
		{
			if(maxP<prices[i]-min)//当天出售股票赚取的收益更高，则更新maxP
				maxP=prices[i]-min;
			if(min>prices[i])//当天的股票价格比之前记录的更低，则更新min
				min=prices[i];
		}
		return maxP;
    }
};