Remove occurrences of substring recursively

Question

Here\'s a problem:

Given string A and a substring B, remove the first occurence of substring B in string A till it is possible to do so. Note that rem

Answer 1

Your approach has a pretty bad complexity. In a very bad case the string a will be aaaaaaaaabbbbbbbbb, and the string b will be ab, in which case you will need O(|a|) searches, each taking O(|a| + |b|) (assuming using some sophisticated search algorithm), resulting in a total complexity of O(|a|^2 + |a| * |b|), which with their constraints is years.

For their constraints a good complexity to aim for would be O(|a| * |b|), which is around 100 million operations, will finish in subsecond. Here's one way to approach it. For each position i in the string a let's compute the largest length n_i, such that the a[i - n_i : i] = b[0 : n_i] (in other words, the longest suffix of a at that position which is a prefix of b). We can compute it in O(|a| + |b|) by using Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm.

After we have n_i computed, finding the first occurrence of b in a is just a matter of finding the first n_i that is equal to |b|. This will be the right end of one of the occurrences of b in a.

Finally, we will need to modify Knuth-Morris-Pratt slightly. We will be logically removing occurrences of b as soon as we compute an n_i that is equal to |b|. To account for the fact that some letters were removed from a we will rely on the fact that Knuth-Morris-Pratt only relies on the last value of n_i (and those computed for b), and the current letter of a, so we just need a fast way of retrieving the last value of n_i after we logically remove an occurrence of b. That can be done with a deque, that stores all the valid values of n_i. Each value will be pushed into the deque once, and popped from it once, so that complexity of maintaining it is O(|a|), while the complexity of the Knuth-Morris-Pratt is O(|a| + |b|), resulting in O(|a| + |b|) total complexity.

Here's a C++ implementation. It could have some off-by-one errors, but it works on your sample, and it flies for the worst case that I described at the beginning.

#include <deque>
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <algorithm>

using namespace std;

int main() {
    string a, b;
    cin >> a >> b;

    size_t blen = b.size();

    // make a = b$a
    a = b + "$" + a;

    vector<size_t> n(a.size()); // array for knuth-morris-pratt
    vector<bool> removals(a.size()); // positions of right ends at which we remove `b`s

    deque<size_t> lastN;
    n[0] = 0;

    // For the first blen + 1 iterations just do vanilla knuth-morris-pratt
    for (size_t i = 1; i < blen + 1; ++ i) {
        size_t z = n[i - 1];
        while (z && a[i] != a[z]) {
            z = n[z - 1];
        }
        if (a[i] != a[z]) n[i] = 0;
        else n[i] = z + 1;

        lastN.push_back(n[i]);
    }

    // For the remaining iterations some characters could have been logically
    //     removed from `a`, so use lastN to get last value of n instaed
    //     of actually getting it from `n[i - 1]`
    for (size_t i = blen + 1; i < a.size(); ++ i) {
        size_t z = lastN.back();
        while (z && a[i] != a[z]) {
            z = n[z - 1];
        }
        if (a[i] != a[z]) n[i] = 0;
        else n[i] = z + 1;

        if (n[i] == blen) // found a match
        {
            removals[i] = true;

            // kill last |b| - 1 `n_i`s
            for (size_t j = 0; j < blen - 1; ++ j) {
                lastN.pop_back();
            }
        }
        else {
            lastN.push_back(n[i]);
        }
    }

    string ret;
    size_t toRemove = 0;
    for (size_t pos = a.size() - 1; a[pos] != '$'; -- pos) {
        if (removals[pos]) toRemove += blen;
        if (toRemove) -- toRemove;
        else ret.push_back(a[pos]);
    }
    reverse(ret.begin(), ret.end());

    cout << ret << endl;

    return 0;
}

[in] hehelllloworld
[in] hell
[out] oworld

[in] abababc
[in] ababc
[out] ab

[in] caaaaa ... aaaaaabbbbbb ... bbbbc
[in] ab
[out] cc