[LeetCode] 5. Longest Palindromic Substring

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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"```

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Solution

The most straightforward way to implement this is to iterate all various substrings and individually check whether it is palindromic and outputs the longest one.

public class Solution {
    public String longestPalindrome(String s) {
        
        int i = 0, j = 0, k = 0, t = 0, max = 1;
        int n = s.length();
        boolean isPalindrome = false;
        String maxString = new String();
        
        Set set = new HashSet<>();
        
        for (i = 0;i < n;i++){
            for (j = i;j < n;j++){
                for (k = 0;k <= j-i;){
                    if (s.charAt(i+k) == s.charAt(j-k))
                        isPalindrome = true;
                    else{
                        isPalindrome = false;
                        break;
                    }
                    k++;
                }
                
                if (isPalindrome){
                    if (max <= j-i+1){
                        max = j-i+1;
                        maxString = s.substring(i,j+1);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        return maxString;
    }
}

Clearly, this method may lead to Time Limit Exceeded.

Therefore a more efficient way is needed. Instead of inspecting every substring to check whether it is palindromic or not, we should try to build palindromic words from ground up. As abcdcba, the words are mirrored from the middle character. Then if s[i,j] is palindromic, we only have to check if the character in front of it and behind it is the same to determine whether s[i-1,j+1] is palindromic.

Hence, rather than iterating all substrings, we only have to check all the available middle spot. In a string of n characters, there is a total of 2n-1 middle spots.

The code is shown below.

public class Solution {
    public String longestPalindrome(String s) {
        
        int l = 0, r = 0, max = 0;
        
        for (int i = 0; i < s.length() ;i++){
            int len1 = substringBuilder(s,i,i);
            int len2 = substringBuilder(s,i,i+1);
            int len = Math.max(len1,len2);
            
            if(len > max){
                l = i - (len-1)/2;
                r = i + len/2 + 1;
                max = len;
            }
        }
        
        return s.substring(l, r);
    }
    
    public int substringBuilder(String s, int left, int right){
        
        int start = left, end = right;
        
        while (start >= 0 && end < s.length() && s.charAt(start) == s.charAt(end)){
            start --;
            end ++;
        }
        
        return end - start - 1;
    }
}

The trick in the solution is to focus on the output on the substringBuilder, because we compare two situation of middle points at s[i,i] and s[i,i+1], if the middle point is at the s[i,i+1], then the length of the palindromic substring is even, which means the least length is 0 or 2; then we should return end - start - 1 as the length of the substring instead of end - start.