How do you rotate a two dimensional array?

Question

Inspired by Raymond Chen\'s post, say you have a 4x4 two dimensional array, write a function that rotates it 90 degrees. Raymond links to a solution in pseudo code, but I\'d

Answer 1

#transpose is a standard method of Ruby's Array class, thus:

% irb
irb(main):001:0> m = [[1, 2, 3, 4], [5, 6, 7, 8], [9, 0, 1, 2], [3, 4, 5, 6]]
=> [[1, 2, 3, 4], [5, 6, 7, 8], [9, 0, 1, 2], [3, 4, 5, 6]] 
irb(main):002:0> m.reverse.transpose
=> [[3, 9, 5, 1], [4, 0, 6, 2], [5, 1, 7, 3], [6, 2, 8, 4]]

The implementation is an n^2 transposition function written in C. You can see it here: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Array.html#method-i-transpose by choosing "click to toggle source" beside "transpose".

I recall better than O(n^2) solutions, but only for specially constructed matrices (such as sparse matrices)

Answer 2

here is my In Place implementation in C

void rotateRight(int matrix[][SIZE], int length) {

    int layer = 0;

    for (int layer = 0; layer < length / 2; ++layer) {

        int first = layer;
        int last = length - 1 - layer;

        for (int i = first; i < last; ++i) {

            int topline = matrix[first][i];
            int rightcol = matrix[i][last];
            int bottomline = matrix[last][length - layer - 1 - i];
            int leftcol = matrix[length - layer - 1 - i][first];

            matrix[first][i] = leftcol;
            matrix[i][last] = topline;
            matrix[last][length - layer - 1 - i] = rightcol;
            matrix[length - layer - 1 - i][first] = bottomline;
        }
    }
}

Answer 3

A couple of people have already put up examples which involve making a new array.

A few other things to consider:

(a) Instead of actually moving the data, simply traverse the "rotated" array differently.

(b) Doing the rotation in-place can be a little trickier. You'll need a bit of scratch place (probably roughly equal to one row or column in size). There's an ancient ACM paper about doing in-place transposes (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/355719.355729), but their example code is nasty goto-laden FORTRAN.

Addendum:

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/355611.355612 is another, supposedly superior, in-place transpose algorithm.

Answer 4

Implementation of dimple's +90 pseudocode (e.g. transpose then reverse each row) in JavaScript:

function rotate90(a){
  // transpose from http://www.codesuck.com/2012/02/transpose-javascript-array-in-one-line.html
  a = Object.keys(a[0]).map(function (c) { return a.map(function (r) { return r[c]; }); });
  // row reverse
  for (i in a){
    a[i] = a[i].reverse();
  }
  return a;
}

Answer 5

PHP:

<?php    
$a = array(array(1,2,3,4),array(5,6,7,8),array(9,0,1,2),array(3,4,5,6));
$b = array(); //result

while(count($a)>0)
{
    $b[count($a[0])-1][] = array_shift($a[0]);
    if (count($a[0])==0)
    {
         array_shift($a);
    }
}

From PHP5.6, Array transposition can be performed with a sleak array_map() call. In other words, columns are converted to rows.

Code: (Demo)

$array = [
    [1, 2, 3, 4],
    [5, 6, 7, 8],
    [9, 0, 1, 2],
    [3, 4, 5, 6]
];
$transposed = array_map(null, ...$array);

$transposed:

[
    [1, 5, 9, 3],
    [2, 6, 0, 4],
    [3, 7, 1, 5],
    [4, 8, 2, 6]
]

Answer 6

This is my implementation, in C, O(1) memory complexity, in place rotation, 90 degrees clockwise:

#include <stdio.h>

#define M_SIZE 5

static void initMatrix();
static void printMatrix();
static void rotateMatrix();

static int m[M_SIZE][M_SIZE];

int main(void){
    initMatrix();
    printMatrix();
    rotateMatrix();
    printMatrix();

    return 0;
}

static void initMatrix(){
    int i, j;

    for(i = 0; i < M_SIZE; i++){
        for(j = 0; j < M_SIZE; j++){
            m[i][j] = M_SIZE*i + j + 1;
        }
    }
}

static void printMatrix(){
    int i, j;

    printf("Matrix\n");
    for(i = 0; i < M_SIZE; i++){
        for(j = 0; j < M_SIZE; j++){
            printf("%02d ", m[i][j]);
        }
        printf("\n");
    }
    printf("\n");
}

static void rotateMatrix(){
    int r, c;

    for(r = 0; r < M_SIZE/2; r++){
        for(c = r; c < M_SIZE - r - 1; c++){
            int tmp = m[r][c];

            m[r][c] = m[M_SIZE - c - 1][r];
            m[M_SIZE - c - 1][r] = m[M_SIZE - r - 1][M_SIZE - c - 1];
            m[M_SIZE - r - 1][M_SIZE - c - 1] = m[c][M_SIZE - r - 1];
            m[c][M_SIZE - r - 1] = tmp;
        }
    }
}