Reorder a string by half the character - algorithm

Question

This is an interview question.
Given a string such as: 123456abcdef consisting of n/2 integers followed by n/2 characters. Reorder the string to contain as 1a2b3c4d5e6f . The algortithm should be in-place.
The solution I gave was trivial - O(n^2). Just shift the characters by n/2 places to the left.
I tried using recursion as -
a. Swap later half of the first half with the previous half of the 2nd part - eg
123 456 abc def
123 abc 456 def
b. Recurse on the two halves.
The pbm I am stuck is that the swapping varies with the number of elements - for eg.
What to do next?
123 abc
12ab 3c
And what to do for : 12345 abcde
123abc 45ab
This is a pretty old question and may be a duplicate. Please let me know.. :)
Another example:
Input: 38726zfgsa
Output: 3z8f7g2s6a

Answer 1

Here's how I would approach the problem:
1) Divide the string into two partitions, number part and letter part
2) Divide each of those partitions into two more (equal sized)
3) Swap the second the third partition (inner number and inner letter)
4) Recurse on the original two partitions (with their newly swapped bits)
5) Stop when the partition has a size of 2
For example:
123456abcdef -> 123456 abcdef -> 123 456 abc def -> 123 abc 456 def
123abc -> 123 abc -> 12 3 ab c -> 12 ab 3 c
12 ab -> 1 2 a b -> 1 a 2 b
... etc
And the same for the other half of the recursion..
All can be done in place with the only gotcha being swapping partitions that aren't the same size (but it'll be off by one, so not difficult to handle).

Answer 2

It is easy to permute an array in place by chasing elements round cycles if you have a bit-map to mark which elements have been moved. We don't have a separate bit-map, but IF your characters are letters (or at least have the high order bit clear) then we can use the top bit of each character to mark this. This produces the following program, which is not recursive and so does not use stack space.
class XX
{
/** new position given old position */
static int newFromOld(int x, int n)
{
if (x < n / 2)
{
return x * 2;
}
return (x - n / 2) * 2 + 1;
}
private static int HIGH_ORDER_BIT = 1 << 15; // 16-bit chars
public static void main(String[] s)
{
// input data - create an array so we can modify
// characters in place
char[] x = s[0].toCharArray();
if ((x.length & 1) != 0)
{
System.err.println("Only works with even length strings");
return;
}
// Character we have read but not yet written, if any
char holding = 0;
// where character in hand was read from
int holdingPos = 0;
// whether picked up a character in our hand
boolean isHolding = false;
int rpos = 0;
while (rpos < x.length)
{ // Here => moved out everything up to rpos
// and put in place with top bit set to mark new occupant
if (!isHolding)
{ // advance read pointer to read new character
char here = x[rpos];
holdingPos = rpos++;
if ((here & HIGH_ORDER_BIT) != 0)
{
// already dealt with
continue;
}
int targetPos = newFromOld(holdingPos, x.length);
// pick up char at target position
holding = x[targetPos];
// place new character, and mark as new
x[targetPos] = (char)(here | HIGH_ORDER_BIT);
// Now holding a character that needs to be put in its
// correct place
isHolding = true;
holdingPos = targetPos;
}
int targetPos = newFromOld(holdingPos, x.length);
char here = x[targetPos];
if ((here & HIGH_ORDER_BIT) != 0)
{ // back to where we picked up a character to hold
isHolding = false;
continue;
}
x[targetPos] = (char)(holding | HIGH_ORDER_BIT);
holding = here;
holdingPos = targetPos;
}
for (int i = 0; i < x.length; i++)
{
x[i] ^= HIGH_ORDER_BIT;
}
System.out.println("Result is " + new String(x));
}
}

Answer 3

These days, if I asked someone that question, what I'm looking for them to write on the whiteboard first is:
assertEquals("1a2b3c4d5e6f",funnySort("123456abcdef"));
...
and then maybe ask for more examples.
(And then, depending, if the task is to interleave numbers & letters, I think you can do it with two walking-pointers, indexLetter and indexDigit, and advance them across swapping as needed til you reach the end.)

Answer 4

In your recursive solution why don't you just make a test if n/2 % 2 == 0 (n%4 ==0 ) and treat the 2 situations differently
As templatetypedef commented your recursion cannot be in-place.
But here is a solution (not in place) using the way you wanted to make your recursion :
def f(s):
n=len(s)
if n==2: #initialisation
return s
elif n%4 == 0 : #if n%4 == 0 it's easy
return f(s[:n/4]+s[n/2:3*n/4])+f(s[n/4:n/2]+s[3*n/4:])
else: #otherwise, n-2 %4 == 0
return s[0]+s[n/2]+f(s[1:n/2]+s[n/2+1:])

Answer 5

Here we go. Recursive, cuts it in half each time, and in-place. Uses the approach outlined by #Chris Mennie. Getting the splitting right was tricky. A lot longer than Python, innit?
/* In-place, divide-and-conquer, recursive riffle-shuffle of strings;
* even length only. No wide characters or Unicode; old school. */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
void testrif(const char *s);
void riffle(char *s);
void rif_recur(char *s, size_t len);
void swap(char *s, size_t midpt, size_t len);
void flip(char *s, size_t len);
void if_odd_quit(const char *s);
int main(void)
{
testrif("");
testrif("a1");
testrif("ab12");
testrif("abc123");
testrif("abcd1234");
testrif("abcde12345");
testrif("abcdef123456");
return 0;
}
void testrif(const char *s)
{
char mutable[20];
strcpy(mutable, s);
printf("'%s'\n", mutable);
riffle(mutable);
printf("'%s'\n\n", mutable);
}
void riffle(char *s)
{
if_odd_quit(s);
rif_recur(s, strlen(s));
}
void rif_recur(char *s, size_t len)
{
/* Turn, e.g., "abcde12345" into "abc123de45", then recurse. */
size_t pivot = len / 2;
size_t half = (pivot + 1) / 2;
size_t twice = half * 2;
if (len < 4)
return;
swap(s + half, pivot - half, pivot);
rif_recur(s, twice);
rif_recur(s + twice, len - twice);
}
void swap(char *s, size_t midpt, size_t len)
{
/* Swap s[0..midpt] with s[midpt..len], in place. Algorithm from
* Programming Pearls, Chapter 2. */
flip(s, midpt);
flip(s + midpt, len - midpt);
flip(s, len);
}
void flip(char *s, size_t len)
{
/* Reverse order of characters in s, in place. */
char *p, *q, tmp;
if (len < 2)
return;
for (p = s, q = s + len - 1; p < q; p++, q--) {
tmp = *p;
*p = *q;
*q = tmp;
}
}
void if_odd_quit(const char *s)
{
if (strlen(s) % 2) {
fputs("String length is odd; aborting.\n", stderr);
exit(1);
}
}

Answer 6

By comparing 123456abcdef and 1a2b3c4d5e6f we can note that only the first and the last characters are in their correct position. We can also note that for each remaining n-2 characters we can compute their correct position directly from their original position. They will get there, and the element that was there surely was not in the correct position, so it will have to replace another one. By doing n-2 such steps all the elements will get to the correct positions:
void funny_sort(char* arr, int n){
int pos = 1; // first unordered element
char aux = arr[pos];
for (int iter = 0; iter < n-2; iter++) { // n-2 unordered elements
pos = (pos < n/2) ? pos*2 : (pos-n/2)*2+1;// correct pos for aux
swap(&aux, arr + pos);
}
}

Answer 7

Score each digit as its numerical value. Score each letter as a = 1.5, b = 2.5 c = 3.5 etc. Run an insertion sort of the string based on the score of each character.
[ETA] Simple scoring won't work so use two pointers and reverse the piece of the string between the two pointers. One pointer starts at the front of the string and advances one step each cycle. The other pointer starts in the middle of the string and advances every second cycle.
123456abcdef
^ ^
1a65432bcdef
^ ^
1a23456bcdef
^ ^
1a2b6543cdef
^ ^