Leetcode – Number of Segments in a String Solution in Python

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In this article, we are going to explore one of the problems on Leetcode called “Number of Segments in a String”. We will discuss different approaches to solving this problem using Python, and analyze the time and space complexity for each.

Table of Contents

  1. Problem Statement and Understanding
  2. Approach 1: Using Python’s Built-in Functions
  3. Approach 2: Iterative Solution
  4. Approach 3: Using Regular Expressions
  5. Time and Space Complexity Analysis
  6. Tips for Optimization
  7. Conclusion

1. Problem Statement and Understanding

Problem Statement

You are given a string s, return the number of segments in the string. A segment is defined to be a contiguous sequence of non-space characters.

Example:

Input: "Hello, my name is John"

Output: 5

Understanding the Problem

The problem asks us to count the number of segments in the given string. A segment is a series of non-space characters separated by one or more spaces. Our goal is to find an efficient way to solve this problem.

2. Approach 1: Using Python’s Built-in Functions

One of the easiest ways to solve this problem is to use Python’s built-in functions. We can use the split method to divide the string into a list of words and simply return the length of this list.

def countSegments(s):
    return len(s.split())

This approach is concise and leverages Python’s in-built capabilities.

3. Approach 2: Iterative Solution

In this approach, we can iterate through the characters of the string and manually count the number of segments.

def countSegments(s):
    segment_count = 0
    for i in range(len(s)):
        # The start of each segment is denoted by either being the start of the string
        # or having a space character to the left
        if (i == 0 or s[i-1] == ' ') and s[i] != ' ':
            segment_count += 1
    return segment_count

In this approach, we only increment the counter when we find the start of a new segment.

4. Approach 3: Using Regular Expressions

We can also use regular expressions to find all the segments in the string and then return the number of matches.

import re

def countSegments(s):
    # This pattern matches one or more non-space characters
    pattern = r'\S+'
    return len(re.findall(pattern, s))

5. Time and Space Complexity Analysis

  • Approach 1: Using the built-in split method has a time complexity of O(n) and a space complexity of O(n), where n is the length of the string.
  • Approach 2: The iterative solution also has a time complexity of O(n) but with a constant space complexity of O(1) as it doesn’t use any additional data structures.
  • Approach 3: The regular expression approach has a time complexity of O(n), and similar to the split method, a space complexity of O(n).

6. Tips for Optimization

For this specific problem, the iterative approach (Approach 2) might be the most optimized in terms of space complexity as it doesn’t require additional space to store the segments. However, in practice, the differences in performance are likely negligible for small strings.

7. Conclusion

In this article, we explored three different approaches to solving the “Number of Segments in a String” problem on LeetCode using Python. Understanding the different approaches helps not only in solving this specific problem but also provides insights that can be applied to other string manipulation challenges. It’s always good to analyze the time and space complexity of your solutions and see if there’s room for optimization.

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