Problem
Problem:I need to write an algorithm that will return length of longest possible palindrome from a given string.
So if the input is aabbbccdfg
Program output should be 7. //–>[cabbbac]
Can someone point it out if there are any problems with below code?
public static void GetLongestPalindromeLength()
{
var input = Console.ReadLine().ToCharArray();
var result = 0;
var countsByChar = input.GroupBy(c => c);
var oddCounts = countsByChar.Where(g => g.Count() % 2 != 0).Select(g => g.Count()).ToList();
var evenCounts = countsByChar.Where(g => g.Count() % 2 == 0).Select(g => g.Count()).ToList();
if (oddCounts.Any())
{
var max = oddCounts.Max();
result += max;
oddCounts.RemoveAt(oddCounts.FindIndex(e => e == max));
result += evenCounts.Sum();
result += oddCounts.Sum(e => e - 1);
}
else if (evenCounts.Any())
{
result += evenCounts.Sum();
}
Console.WriteLine(result);
Console.ReadKey();
}
Solution
Well, I think your algorithm is correct, but the code is quite bloat. Your code suggest that the longest palindrome size can be calculated by sum of n / 2 * 2
where n
is the count of distinct alphabet that exists more than once in the string, and plus 1 if there are any “oddCounts”. So you can reduce the code to
private static int GetLongestPalindrome(string value) {
var map = value.GroupBy(c => c);
int result = map.Sum(r => r.Count() / 2 * 2);
if (map.Any(r => r.Count() % 2 != 0))
{
result++;
}
return result;
}
n / 2 * 2
is the way to calculate for the nearest even number toward zero, and it equals to n - 1
where n
is positive odd number.