Find the First Unique Element in a Stream of Characters at any Given Point
Problem Statement: Find the first unique element in a stream of characters at any given point.
Input: a b c d a b c Output: a a a a b c d
This competitive coding challenge was asked in the Flipkart SDE coding interview round.
Solution
The most efficient solution to this problem is to solve it with the doubly linked list.
You can use any programming language like C/C++, Python, Java, etc to solve this coding question.
Here is the Python code to solve this problem. I have added precise comments describing each line.
Python code:
# Find the first unique element in a stream of characters
# at any given point.
MAX_CHAR_SIZE = 256
def find_first_unique_char(msg):
# charDLL is doubly linked list.
# if x is present in DLL, charDLL[x] contains pointer to a DLL node.
# If x is not present in DLL, then charDLL[x] is NULL
charDLL = [] * MAX_CHAR_SIZE
# repeated is the list of boolean values.
# Here, repeated[x] is true if x is repeated two or more times.
# Else, False
repeated = [False] * MAX_CHAR_SIZE
out = ""
for i in range(len(msg)):
ch = msg[i]
# We process this character only if it has nomat occurred
# or occurred only once. repeated[x] is true if x is
# repeated twice or more.
if not repeated[ord(ch)]:
# If the character is not in charDLL, then add this
# at the end of DLL
if not ch in charDLL:
charDLL.append(ch)
else:
charDLL.remove(ch)
repeated[ord(ch)] = True
if len(charDLL) != 0:
out += charDLL[0]
return out
msgs = ["abcdabc", "csestacklearnprogrammingpracticaly"]
for msg in msgs:
print("\nInput string:")
print(msg)
print("Output string:")
out = find_first_unique_char(msg)
print(out)Output:
Input string: abcdabc Output string: aaaabcd Input string: csestacklearnprogrammingpracticaly Output string: cccccceeetttttttttttttttttttkkkkkk
Try giving different input by covering all the corner cases.
The code is self-explanatory with the comments I have added. If you still have any doubts, let’s discuss them in the comment section below.
