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

A C++ solution:

#include <string>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

string revwords(string in) {
    string rev;
    int wordlen = 0;
    for (int i = in.length(); i >= 0; --i) {
        if (i == 0 || iswspace(in[i-1])) {
            if (wordlen) {
                for (int j = i; wordlen--; )
                    rev.push_back(in[j++]);
                wordlen = 0;
            }
            if (i > 0)
                rev.push_back(in[i-1]);
        }
        else
            ++wordlen;
    }
    return rev;
}

int main() {
    cout << revwords("this is a sentence") << "." << endl;
    cout << revwords("  a sentence   with extra    spaces   ") << "." << endl;
    return 0;
}

Answer 2

A Ruby solution.

# Reverse all words in string
def reverse_words(string)
  return string if string == ''

  reverse(string, 0, string.size - 1)

  bounds = next_word_bounds(string, 0)

  while bounds.all? { |b| b < string.size }
    reverse(string, bounds[:from], bounds[:to])
    bounds = next_word_bounds(string, bounds[:to] + 1)
  end

  string
end

# Reverse a single word between indices "from" and "to" in "string"
def reverse(s, from, to)
    half = (from - to) / 2 + 1

    half.times do |i|
        s[from], s[to] = s[to], s[from]
        from, to = from.next, to.next
    end

    s
end

# Find the boundaries of the next word starting at index "from"
def next_word_bounds(s, from)
  from = s.index(/\S/, from) || s.size
  to = s.index(/\s/, from + 1) || s.size

  return { from: from, to: to - 1 }
end

Answer 3

In pseudo code:

reverse input string
reverse each word (you will need to find word boundaries)

Answer 4

This problem can be solved with O(n) in time and O(1) in space. The sample code looks as mentioned below:

    public static string reverseWords(String s)
    {

        char[] stringChar = s.ToCharArray();
        int length = stringChar.Length, tempIndex = 0;

        Swap(stringChar, 0, length - 1);

        for (int i = 0; i < length; i++)
        {
            if (i == length-1)
            {
                Swap(stringChar, tempIndex, i);
                tempIndex = i + 1;
            }
            else if (stringChar[i] == ' ')
            {
                Swap(stringChar, tempIndex, i-1);
                tempIndex = i + 1;
            }
        }

        return new String(stringChar);
    }

    private static void Swap(char[] p, int startIndex, int endIndex)
    {
        while (startIndex < endIndex)
        {
            p[startIndex] ^= p[endIndex];
            p[endIndex] ^= p[startIndex];
            p[startIndex] ^= p[endIndex];
            startIndex++;
            endIndex--;
        }
    }

Answer 5

Push each word onto a stack. Pop all the words off the stack.

Answer 6

The algorithm to solve this problem is based on two steps process, first step will reverse the individual words of string,then in second step, reverse whole string. Implementation of algorithm will take O(n) time and O(1) space complexity.

      #include <stdio.h>
      #include <string.h>

      void reverseStr(char* s, int start, int end);

      int main()
      {
              char s[] = "This is test string";

              int start = 0;
              int end = 0;
              int i = 0;

              while (1) {

              if (s[i] == ' ' || s[i] == '\0')
              {
                    reverseStr(s, start, end-1);
                    start = i + 1;
                    end = start;
              }
              else{
                    end++;
              }

              if(s[i] == '\0'){
                   break;
              }
              i++;
      }

      reverseStr(s, 0, strlen(s)-1);
      printf("\n\noutput= %s\n\n", s);

      return 0;
  }

  void reverseStr(char* s, int start, int end)
  {
     char temp;
     int j = end;
     int i = start;

     for (i = start; i < j ; i++, j--) {
          temp = s[i];
          s[i] = s[j];
          s[j] = temp;
     }
 }