Given two strings A and B and these strings contain lower case letters. The task is to tell the length of the merged strings. For example, given A is “abcde” and B is “cdefg”, then merging the two strings results in “abcdefg”. The merge operation is performed in such a manner that the joining characters are both the suffix of A and Prefix of B. Before merging you are allowed to do any ONE of the following operations:
- Reverse string A
- Reverse string B
Examples:
Input : A = "ababc" B = "bcabc" Output : Length is 8 the suffix of string A i.e "bc" and prefix of B i.e "bc" is the same so the merged string will be "ababcabc" and length is 8. Input : A = "cdefg" B = "abhgf" Output : Length is 8 the suffix of string A i.e "fg" and prefix of reversed B i.e "fg" is the same so the merged string will be "cdefghba" and length is 8 Input : A = "wxyz" B = "zyxw" Output : Length is 4
Below is the Python code implementation of the above mentioned approach.
# function to find the length of the # merged string def mergedstring(x, y) :
k = len (y)
for i in range ( len (x)) :
if x[i:] = = y[:k] :
break
else :
k = k - 1
# uncomment the below statement to
# know what the merged string is
# print(a + b[k:])
return len (a + b[k:])
# function to find the minimum length # among the merged string def merger(a, b):
# reverse b
b1 = b[:: - 1 ]
# function call to find the length
# of string without reversing string 'B'
r1 = mergedstring(a, b)
# function call to find the length
# of the string by reversing string 'B'
r2 = mergedstring(a, b1)
# compare between lengths
if r1 > r2 :
print ("Length is ", r2)
else :
print ("Length is ", r1)
# driver code a = "abcbc"
b = "bcabc"
merger(a, b) |
Output:
Length is 8
Time complexity: O(n^2) where n is the length of the longer string between a and b.
Auxiliary space: O(1) as we are not using any data structures to store intermediate results.