Develop Reference

Finding the nth term in a sequence

I have a sequence, and I am trying to make a program to find the nth term of the sequence.
The sequence is as follows:
1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, 312211...
In this sequence, each term describes the previous term. For example, "1211" means that the previous term; the previous term is "21" where there is one occurrence of a 2 and then one occurrence of a 1 (=1211). To get the third term, "21," you look at the second term: 11. There are two occurrences of a 1 which gives us "21."
import java.util.*;
class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
int n = scan.nextInt();
System.out.println( Main.num(n-1, "1"));
}
public static String num(int times, String x){
if(times == 0){
return x;
}else{
//System.out.println("meow");
String y = "" + x.charAt(0);
int counter = 0;
for(int i = 1; i < x.length(); i++){
if(x.charAt(i) == x.charAt(i-1)){
counter++;
}else{
y += "" + counter + x.charAt(i-1);
counter = 0;
}
}
return num(times--, y);
}
//return "";
}
}
My code uses recursion to find the nth term. But, it gives us errors :(
First, I start of the method "num" by passing it the number of terms-1 (since the first term is already given) and the first term (1).
In the method num, we start off by using a conditional to establish the base case (when you are done finding the nth term).
If the base case is false, then you find the next term in the sequence.

This is a very cool sequence! I like that it is English based and not mathematical, haha. (Though now I wonder ... is there a formula we could make for the nth term? I'm pretty sure it's impossible or uses some crazy-level math, but just something to think about ...)
In your solution, the recursive logic of your code is correct: after you find each term, you repeat the method with your knew number and find the next term using that element, and end when you have determined the first n elements. Your base case is also correct.
However, the algorithm you developed for determining the terms in the sequence is the issue.
To determine the next element in the sequence, we want to:
Logical Error:
Create a empty variable, y, for your next element. The variable, counter, should not start at 0, however. This is because every element will ALWAYS have an occurrence of at least 1, so we should initialize int counter = 1;
Iterate through the characters in x. (You did this step correctly) We begin at i = 1, because we compare each character to the previous one.
If the current character is equal to the previous character, we increment counter by 1.
Otherwise, we concatenate counter and the character being repeated, to y. Remember, to reinitialize counter to 1, not 0.
Technical Errors:
Once we reach the end of iterating x, we need to concatenate our final counter and character to y, since the else statement for the final characters will never run in our for loop.
This is done with the following code: y += "" + counter + x.charAt(x.length() - 1);
Finally, when you are doing your recursive call, you should do --times instead of times--. The difference between these two parameters is that with your original code, you are post-decrementing. This means the value of times is decreasing after the method call, when we want the decreased value to be sent into the method. To solve this, we need to pre-decrement, by doing --times.
import java.util.*;
class CoolSequence {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
int n = scan.nextInt();
System.out.println(num(n, "1"));
}
public static String num(int times, String x){
if(times == 0){
return x;
}
else{
String y = "";
int counter = 1;
for(int i = 1; i < x.length(); i++){
if(x.charAt(i) == x.charAt(i - 1)){
counter++;
}
else{
y += "" + counter + x.charAt(i - 1);
counter = 1;
}
}
y += "" + counter + x.charAt(x.length() - 1);
return num(--times, y);
}
}
}
Testing:
6
13112221
An alternative approach would be using an iterative method:
import java.util.*;
class CoolSequence2 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
ArrayList<String> nums = new ArrayList<String>();
int n = scan.nextInt();
String val = "1";
for(int i = 0; i < n; i++){
String copy = val;
val = "";
while(!copy.equals("")){
char curr = copy.charAt(0);
int ind = 0;
int cons = 0;
while(ind < copy.length() && curr == copy.charAt(ind)){
cons += 1;
ind += 1;
}
val += String.valueOf(cons) + copy.charAt(cons - 1);
copy = copy.substring(cons);
}
nums.add(val);
}
System.out.println(nums.get(nums.size() - 1));
}
}
6
13112221
In this method, we use a for loop to iterate through n terms. To determine each element, we do a similar method to your logic:
We create an empty string, val, to hold the new element, and store our current element in copy. We also initialize a cons, similar to your counter.
While copy is not empty, we iterate through copy and increment cons until there is an element that is not equal to the next element.
When this occurs, we concatenate cons and the repeated element to val, like in your code. Then, we cut out the repeated elements from copy and continue the process.
We add the new value of val to nums, and keep iterating through the n elements.
I hope these two methods of approaching your problem helped! Please let me know if you have any further questions or clarifications :)

You can use Pattern with backreference.
The regular expression "(.)\\1*" matches any single character ("(.)") and zero or more sequences of the same character ("\\1*"). "\\1" is called a backreference, it refers to the string enclosed in parentheses 1st.
For example, it matches 111, 22 and 1 for 111221.
replaceAll() calls the lambda expression specified by the argument each time it matches. The lambda expression receives a MatchResult and returns a string. The matched string is replaced with the result.
The lambda expression in this case concatenates the length of the matched string (match.group().length()) and the first character (match.group(1)).
static final Pattern SEQUENCE_OF_SAME_CHARACTER = Pattern.compile("(.)\\1*");
static String num(int times, String x) {
for (int i = 0; i < times; ++i)
x = SEQUENCE_OF_SAME_CHARACTER.matcher(x).replaceAll(
match -> match.group().length() + match.group(1));
return x;
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
for (int i = 1; i <= 8; ++i)
System.out.print(num(i - 1, "1") + " ");
}
output:
1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 13112221 1113213211

How to define number sequence in string?

I have a task to create a string with a non-defined length (input digits from the keyboard until the user presses "Enter"), then I have to define how many of digits are in sequence. Unfortunately I can't handle this. I think I'm almost there but I'm not. I've created the string which I hoped to copy character by character to an array and then compare each digit with the next one, but I have trouble with copying characters into an array.
Here's my code:
int sum = 0;
String someSymbols = sc.nextLine();
int array [] = new int[someSymbols.length()];
for(int i=0; i<someSymbols.length(); i++){
for (int j=0; j<=array.length; j++){
array[j] = someSymbols.charAt(i);
}
sum++;
}

Not sure of what you want to achieve but here are 2 examples for inspiration:
Taking digits until reaching a different digit. Ignoring non digits
String s = "22u223r5";
String digitsOnly = s.replaceAll("[^\\d.]", "");
int firstDifferentDigit = -1;
for(int i = 1; i < digitsOnly.length(); i++) {
if(digitsOnly.charAt(i) != digitsOnly.charAt(i-1)) {
firstDifferentDigit = i;
break;
}
}
System.out.println("firstDifferentDigit:"+firstDifferentDigit);
System.out.println(digitsOnly.substring(0,firstDifferentDigit));
Outputs
firstDifferentDigit:4
2222
Taking digits until first non digit
String s = "124g35h6j3lk4kj56";
int firstNonDigitCharacter = -1;
for(int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++) {
if(s.charAt(i) < '0' || s.charAt(i) > '9') {
firstNonDigitCharacter = i;
break;
}
}
System.out.println("firstNonDigitCharacter:"+firstNonDigitCharacter);
System.out.println(s.substring(0,firstNonDigitCharacter));
Outputs
firstNonDigitCharacter:3
124
EDIT
This works for how you described the exercise:
String someSymbols = "72745123";
List<String> sequences = new ArrayList<>();
boolean inSequence = false; // will flag if we are currently within a sequence
StringBuilder currentSequence = new StringBuilder(); // this will store the numbers of the sequence
for(int i = 0; i < someSymbols.length(); i++) {
char currentChar = someSymbols.charAt(i);
char nextChar = 0;
if(i < someSymbols.length()-1)
nextChar = someSymbols.charAt(i+1);
// if next number is 1 more than the current one, we are in a sequence
if(currentChar == nextChar-1) {
inSequence = true;
currentSequence.append(String.valueOf(currentChar));
// if next number is NOT 1 more than the current one and we are in a sequence, it is the last of the sequence
} else if(inSequence) {
currentSequence.append(String.valueOf(currentChar));
sequences.add(currentSequence.toString());
currentSequence = new StringBuilder();
inSequence = false;
}
}
System.out.println(sequences);
Outputs
[45, 123]

Thanks a lot! I made it with your help! It turns out that the task was to count how many numbers occur in the string of any symbols. As simple as that. My bad! But I'm grateful to be part of this forum :)
Here's the code:
String f = sc.nextLine();
int count = 0;
for(int i=0; i<f.length(); i++){
if((f.charAt(i)>='0') && (f.charAt(i)<='9')){
count++;
}
}
System.out.println("The numbers in the row are : " + count);

I deleted my first answer, because I got the question wrong, thought it's about a character sequence, of which some happen to be digits.
Trying to wrap my head around the new functional style in Java8, but conversion is complicated and full of pitfalls. Surely, this isn't canonical. I guess a collector could be appropriate here, but I broke out and made half of the work in an recursive method.
import java.util.*;
import java.util.stream.*;
String s = "123534567321468"
List<Integer> li = IntStream.range (0, s.length()-2).filter (i -> (s.charAt(i+1) != s.charAt(i)+1)).collect (ArrayList::new, List::add, List::addAll);
li.add (s.length()-1);
int maxDiff (int last, List<Integer> li , int maxdiff) {
if (li.isEmpty ())
return maxdiff;
return maxDiff (li.get(0), li.subList (1, li.size () - 1), Math.max (li.get(0) - last, maxdiff));
}
int result = maxDiff (0, li, 0);
It starts elegantly.
IntStream.range (0, s.length()-2).filter (i -> (s.charAt(i+1) != s.charAt(i)+1))
| Expression value is: java.util.stream.IntPipeline$9#5ce81285
| assigned to temporary variable $20 of type IntStream
-> $20.forEach (i -> System.out.println (i));
2
3
8
9
10
11
12
That's the List of indexes, where chains of numbers are broken.
String s = "123534567321468"
123 is from 0 to 2, 5 is just 3, 34567, the later winner from 4 to 8, ...
Note that we needn't transform the String into Numbers, since the characters are chained in ASCII or UTF-X one by one, like numbers.
To convert it into a List, the complicated collect method is used, because Array of primitive int doesn't work well with List .
For the last interval, li.add (s.length()-1) has to be added - adding elements wouldn't work with array.
maxDiff protocolls the max so far, the last element and repeatedly takes the head from the list, to compare it with the last element to build the current difference.
The Code was testet in the jshell of Java9, which is an amazing tool and needs no embedding class, nor 'main' for snippets. :)
Just for comparison, this is my solution in scala:
val s = "123534567321468"
val cuts = (0 to s.length-2).filter (i => {s.charAt(i+1) != s.charAt(i)+1}).toList ::: s.length-1 :: Nil
(0 :: cuts).sliding (2, 1).map {p => p(1) - p(0)}.max
Sliding(a,b) defines a window of width a=2 which moves forward by b=1.

Using HashMaps to find string frequencies

My code is meant to find the most frequent codon from a file that contains a lonf string of DNA (i.e. CTAAATCGATGGCGATGATAAATG...). starting at the initial position pos, every three characters makes up one codon. The problem I have is that whenever I run the code, it tell me that the string index is out of range. I know that the issue is in the line
str = line.substring(idx, idx + 2);
but don't know how to fix it. Also, I am not sure whether I am counting frequencies correctly. I needed to increment the value of every key that is seen more than once.
public static void findgene(String line){
int idx, pos;
int[] freq = new int[100];
String str;
//pos is the position to start at
pos = 0;
idx = pos;
for(int i = 0; i < line.length(); i++){
if(idx >= 0){
//makes every three characters into a codon
str = line.substring(idx, idx + 2);
//checks if the codon was previously seen
if(genes.containsKey(str)){
genes.put(str, freq[i]++);
}
idx = idx + 2;
}
}
}

You are incrementing idx by 2 with each iteration of the loop. However, you did not impose any restriction on the upper limit of idx.
Thus the the parameter of the substring() function soon goes out of range in the line:
str = line.substring(idx, idx + 2);
What you need to do is change the condition to:
if(idx+2<=line.length()){
//code here
}

Fastest way to calculate all the substrings of a string and check it for a given condition

What is the fastest possible way to calculate all the possible substrings of a given string and check them for the following condition.
The condition is:
If the first and the last Character of the generated substring is same then count is incremented by one. We need to find all such possible substrings of a given very large string.
I have tried the naive brute force approach but it did not work for strings with lengths 10^7.
Please help :(
for(int c = 0 ; c < length ; c++ )
{
for( i = 3 ; i <= length - c ; i++ )
{
String sub = str.substring(c, c+i);
System.out.println(sub);
if(sub.charAt(0) == sub.charAt(sub.length()-1)){
count++;
}
}
}

Your current solution is quadratic for the size of the input string or O(n^2)
You can solve this more efficiently by counting the occurrence of each character in the string, and then counting the number of substrings that can be created with this character.
E.g. if a character occurs 4 times, then this leads to 3 + 2 + 1 = 6 substrings.
You can use the following formula for this: ((n-1) * n) / 2
This brings the complexity of the algorithm down to O(n), because for counting each character you only need to traverse the String once.
I believe this code should work:
public static void main(String[] args) {
String str = "xyzxyzxyzxyz";
Map<Character, Integer> map = new HashMap<>();
for (char c : str.toCharArray())
{
Integer count = map.get(c);
if (count == null)
count = 0;
map.put(c, count + 1);
}
int sum = 0;
for (int n : map.values())
sum += ((n - 1) * n) / 2;
System.out.println(sum);
}

Matching subsequence of length 2 (at same index) in two strings

Given 2 strings, a and b, return the number of the positions where they contain the same length 2 substring. For instance a and b is respectively "xxcaazz" and "xxbaaz" yields 3, since the "xx", "aa", and "az" substrings appear in the same place in both strings.
What is wrong with my solution?
int count=0;
for(int i=0;i<a.length();i++)
{
for(int u=i; u<b.length(); u++)
{
String aSub=a.substring(i,i+1);
String bSub=b.substring(u,u+1);
if(aSub.equals(bSub))
count++;
}
}
return count;
}

In order to fix your solution, you really don't need the inner loop. Since the index should be same for the substrings in both string, only one loop is needed.
Also, you should iterate till 2nd last character of the smaller string, to avoid IndexOutOfBounds. And for substring, give i+2 as second argument instead.
Overall, you would have to change your code to something like this:
int count=0;
for(int i=0; i < small(a, b).length()-1; i++)
{
String aSub=a.substring(i,i+2);
String bSub=b.substring(i,i+2);
if(aSub.equals(bSub))
count++;
}
}
return count;
Why I asked about the length of string is, it might become expensive to create substrings of length 2 in loop. For length n of smaller string, you would be creating 2 * n substrings.
I would rather not create substring, and just match character by character, while keeping track of whether previous character matched or not. This will work perfectly fine in your case, as length of substring to match is 2. Code would be like:
String a = "iaxxai";
String b = "aaxxaaxx";
boolean lastCharacterMatch = false;
int count = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < Math.min(a.length(), b.length()); i++) {
if (a.charAt(i) == b.charAt(i)) {
if (lastCharacterMatch) {
count++;
} else {
lastCharacterMatch = true;
}
} else {
lastCharacterMatch = false;
}
}
System.out.println(count);

The heart of the problem lies with your usage of the substring method. The important thing to note is that the beginning index is inclusive, and the end index is exclusive.
As an example, dissecting your usage, String aSub=a.substring(i,i+1); in the first iteration of the loop i = 0 so this line is then String aSub=a.substring(0,1); From the javadocs, and my explanation above, this would result in a substring from the first character to the first character or String aSub="x"; Changing this to i+2 and u+2 will get you the desired behavior but beware of index out of bounds errors with the way your loops are currently written.

String a = "xxcaazz";
String b = "xxbaaz";
int count = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < (a.length() > b.length() ? b : a).length() - 1; i++) {
String aSub = a.substring(i, i + 2);
String bSub = b.substring(i, i + 2);
if (aSub.equals(bSub)) {
count++;
}
}
System.out.println(count);