Efficiently reverse the order of the words (not characters) in an array of characters

Question

Given an array of characters which forms a sentence of words, give an efficient algorithm to reverse the order of the words (not characters) in it.

Example input and

Answer 1

You would use what is known as an iterative recursive function, which is O(N) in time as it takes N (N being the number of words) iterations to complete and O(1) in space as each iteration holds its own state within the function arguments.

(define (reverse sentence-to-reverse)
  (reverse-iter (sentence-to-reverse ""))

(define (reverse-iter(sentence, reverse-sentence)
  (if (= 0 string-length sentence)
    reverse-sentence
    ( reverse-iter( remove-first-word(sentence), add-first-word(sentence, reverse-sentence)))

Note: I have written this in scheme which I am a complete novice, so apologies for lack of correct string manipulation.

remove-first-word finds the first word boundary of sentence, then takes that section of characters (including space and punctuation) and removes it and returns new sentence

add-first-word finds the first word boundary of sentence, then takes that section of characters (including space and punctuation) and adds it to reverse-sentence and returns new reverse-sentence contents.

Answer 2

#include <string>
#include <boost/next_prior.hpp>

void reverse(std::string& foo) {
    using namespace std;
    std::reverse(foo.begin(), foo.end());
    string::iterator begin = foo.begin();
    while (1) {
        string::iterator space = find(begin, foo.end(), ' ');
        std::reverse(begin, space);
        begin = boost::next(space);
        if (space == foo.end())
            break;
    }
}

Answer 3

using System;

namespace q47407
{
    class MainClass
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string s = Console.ReadLine();
            string[] r = s.Split(' ');
            for(int i = r.Length-1 ; i >= 0; i--)
                Console.Write(r[i] + " ");
            Console.WriteLine();

        }
    }
}

edit: i guess i should read the whole question... carry on.

Answer 4

in Ruby

"this is a string".split.reverse.join(" ")

Answer 5

in C#, in-place, O(n), and tested:

static char[] ReverseAllWords(char[] in_text)
{
    int lindex = 0;
    int rindex = in_text.Length - 1;
    if (rindex > 1)
    {
        //reverse complete phrase
        in_text = ReverseString(in_text, 0, rindex);

        //reverse each word in resultant reversed phrase
        for (rindex = 0; rindex <= in_text.Length; rindex++)
        {
            if (rindex == in_text.Length || in_text[rindex] == ' ')
            {
                in_text = ReverseString(in_text, lindex, rindex - 1);
                lindex = rindex + 1;
            }
        }
    }
    return in_text;
}

static char[] ReverseString(char[] intext, int lindex, int rindex)
{
    char tempc;
    while (lindex < rindex)
    {
        tempc = intext[lindex];
        intext[lindex++] = intext[rindex];
        intext[rindex--] = tempc;
    }
    return intext;
}

Answer 6

A one liner:

l="Is this as expected ??"
" ".join(each[::-1] for each in l[::-1].split())

Output:

'?? expected as this Is'