PROBLEM LINKS:
Author: Praveen Dhinwa
Primary Tester: Hasan Jaddouh
Editorialist: Aulene De
DIFFICULTY:
Cakewalk
PREREQUISITES:
None
PROBLEM:
A string is given in the form of ‘H’, ’T’ and ‘.’ characters, where H denotes the head, T denotes the tail and ‘.’ denotes the time between a snake passing or a the time between one snake and another. Given a string, check if it is a valid sequence of ordering of snakes.
EXPLANATION:
Let’s see… the ‘.’ characters don’t look useful. Do they? Nah. They’re just signifying empty spaces… which doesn’t help us at all. Ignore them.
Now, we have a string made up entirely of ‘H’ and ’T’ characters. This string denotes the ordering of the snakes. Alright, so when is a string invalid?
So, like most animals, a snake can’t have two heads or tails. Thus, we can’t have two ‘H’ or ’T’ characters together. What else?
Let’s see, we can’t have a tail appearing before a head, that’s preposterous! Similarly, we can’t have a head without a tail. Could these two cases appear anywhere in our string?
Sadly, they can. The first case will appear only at the beginning of the string. The second will appear towards the end.
Thus, we can simply check if any of the above conditions is true, thus making our answer ‘Invalid’. Otherwise, our answer is ‘Valid’. We have a cute solution.
Simply put, the only way a string is valid is when it is of the form “HTHTHTHT”. Starts with an ‘H’, ends with a ’T’ and no character should repeat right after itself.
PS: Finding edge cases is always important. Take whatever is in a problem statement at face-value and don’t assume that a case isn’t possible. To put it in Sherlock’s words - “If you eliminate the improbable, whatever remains must be the truth”. Always be on the lookout for cases where your code could fail.
SOLUTIONS:
Editorialist’s solution - https://pastebin.com/LEfk2hsy