Given a string of a million numbers, return all repeating 3 digit numbers

Question

I had an interview with a hedge fund company in New York a few months ago and unfortunately, I did not get the internship offer as a data/software engineer. (They also asked

Answer 1

I would solve the problem as follows:

def find_numbers(str_num):
    final_dict = {}
    buffer = {}
    for idx in range(len(str_num) - 3):
        num = int(str_num[idx:idx + 3])
        if num not in buffer:
            buffer[num] = 0
        buffer[num] += 1
        if buffer[num] > 1:
            final_dict[num] = buffer[num]
    return final_dict

Applied to your example string, this yields:

>>> find_numbers("123412345123456")
{345: 2, 234: 3, 123: 3}

This solution runs in O(n) for n being the length of the provided string, and is, I guess, the best you can get.