LeetCode #5 : Longest Palindromic Substring

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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指向中间字符之后向前后两个方向扫描，能够满足回文序列的最大长度，记录这个长度和起始位置，并不断推进中间位置，直到string的末尾，返回最长回文序列子串。

string longestPalindrome(string s) {
    if (s.empty()) return "";
    if (s.size() == 1) return s;
    int min_start = 0, max_len = 1;
    for (int i = 0; i < s.size();) {
      if (s.size() - i <= max_len / 2) break;
      int j = i, k = i;
      while (k < s.size()-1 && s[k+1] == s[k]) ++k; // Skip duplicate characters.
      i = k+1;
      while (k < s.size()-1 && j > 0 && s[k + 1] == s[j - 1]) { ++k; --j; } // Expand.
      int new_len = k - j + 1;
      if (new_len > max_len) { min_start = j; max_len = new_len; }
    }
    return s.substr(min_start, max_len);
}