Software Engineer Data Structures & Algorithms Interview Questions

Vince S. - "func isMatch(text: String, pattern: String) -> Bool { // Convert strings to arrays for easier indexing let s = Array(text.characters) let p = Array(pattern.characters) guard !s.isEmpty && !p.isEmpty else { return true } // Create DP table: dpi represents if s[0...i-1] matches p[0...j-1] var dp = Array(repeating: Array(repeating: false, count: p.count + 1), count: s.count + 1) // Empty pattern matches empty string dp[0]["See full answer

Nicholas S. - "Definitely nice to think of this without memorization, but there is a well known algorithm for this problem, which is the Levenshtein Distance. Lev(a,b) = len(a) if len(b) == 0 = len(b) if len(a) == 0 = lev(a[1:], b[1:] if a[0] == b[0] = 1 + min (lev(a, b[1:]), lev(a[1:], b), lev(a[1:], b[1:])) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance I'm sure some optimizations could be made with heuristic."See full answer

Divyani .. - "Did the code in Python"See full answer

Nishigandha B. - "na"See full answer

Karthik R. - "Use Dijkstra's Algorithm with priority queue"See full answer

Shivani N. - "did well but messed up dequeue"See full answer

Idan R. - " read_dir(path: str) -> list[str] returns the full path of all files and sub- directories of a given directory. is_file(path: str) -> bool: returns true if the path points to a regular file. is_dir(path: str) -> bool: returns true if the path points to a directory. read_file(path: str) -> str: reads and returns the content of the file. The algorithm: notice that storing all the file contents' is too space intensive, so we can't read all the files' contents to store and compare with each"See full answer

Lakshman B. - "As we can pass info to only one child at a time, I told that from any given node, we have to pass the info to that child(of this node) which has the largest subtree rooted at it. To calculate the subtree sizes, I used DFS. And then to calculate the minimum time to pass info to all the nodes, I used BFS picking the largest subtree child first at every node. I couldn't write the complete code in the given time and also made a mistake in telling the overall time complexity of my approach. I think t"See full answer

Anonymous Unicorn - "input = [ {"topic": 1, "chapter": 1, "section": 1}, {"topic": 2, "chapter": 2, "section": 1}, {"topic": 3, "chapter": 2, "section": 2}, {"topic": 4, "chapter": 1, "section": 1}, {"topic": 5, "chapter": 1, "section": 1}, {"topic": 6, "chapter": 2, "section": 2}, {"topic": 7, "chapter": 2, "section": 2}, {"topic": 8, "chapter": 2, "section": 3}, ] expected_output = [ {'chapter': 1, 'sections': [ {'section': 1, 'topics': [ {'top"See full answer

Ravi C. - "boolean isMatch(String s, String p) { int i=0; int j=0; int sID=-1; int prevM=-1; while(i<s.length()){ if(j<p.length() && (s.charAt(i)==p.charAt(j) || p.charAt(j)=='?')){ i++; j++; }else if(j<p.length() && p.charAt(j)=='*'){ sID=j; prevM=i; j++; }else if(sID!=-1){ j=sID+1; prevM++; i=prevM; }else{ return false; } } while(j<p.length() && p.charAt(j)=='*') j++; if(i!=s.length() || j!=p.leng"See full answer

Shar N. - "standard answer for this."See full answer

Aziz V. - "ArrayList allows constant time access (O(1)) to elements using their index because it uses a dynamic array internally, whereas LinkedList requires traversal from the head node, resulting in linear time complexity (O(n))."See full answer

Susheel C. - "I wrote a function to determine if a given number is a power of 2 using logarithms."See full answer

Tiago R. - "function isPalindrome(s, start, end) { while (s[start] === s[end] && end >= start) { start++; end--; } return end <= start; } function longestPalindromicSubstring(s) { let longestPalindrome = ''; for (let i=0; i < s.length; i++) { let j = s.length-1; while (s[i] !== s[j] && i <= j) { j--; } if (s[i] === s[j]) { if (isPalindrome(s, i, j)) { const validPalindrome = s.substring(i, j+1"See full answer