Is Palindrome Partitioning II easy or hard?

Palindrome Partitioning II is classified as a Hard problem on LeetCode. The challenge comes from combining palindrome detection with dynamic programming to minimize cuts efficiently instead of checking all partitions.

How to solve Palindrome Partitioning II in O(n^2)?

Use dynamic programming. Precompute palindrome substrings using a 2D DP table or detect them by expanding around centers. Maintain a DP array where dp[i] stores the minimum cuts for the prefix ending at index i, updating it whenever a palindrome substring is found.

Palindrome Partitioning II Python or Java solution?

Both Python and Java implementations use the same DP logic. Maintain an array storing the minimum cuts for each prefix and either precompute palindrome substrings with a 2D table or detect them with center expansion. The overall complexity remains O(n^2).

What is the best approach for Palindrome Partitioning II?

The most common solution uses dynamic programming with a palindrome table. First precompute whether every substring s[i..j] is a palindrome, then compute the minimum cuts needed for each prefix using DP. This approach runs in O(n^2) time and O(n^2) space and is the version most interviewers expect.

What data structure is used in Palindrome Partitioning II?

The solution typically uses dynamic programming arrays and sometimes a 2D boolean table to store palindrome checks. Some optimized solutions replace the table with center expansion while keeping a DP array for minimum cuts.

What is the time complexity of Palindrome Partitioning II?

Optimal solutions run in O(n^2) time. Both the palindrome-table dynamic programming approach and the center-expansion method examine O(n^2) substring combinations while updating minimum cut values.

Is Palindrome Partitioning II asked at Google, Amazon, or Meta?

Palindrome Partitioning style problems appear frequently in interviews at companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta because they combine string manipulation with dynamic programming. Variants often test substring DP, palindrome detection, and optimal partitioning strategies.

132. Palindrome Partitioning II - Practice Online

Given a string s, partition s such that every substring of the partition is a palindrome.

Return the minimum cuts needed for a palindrome partitioning of s.

Example 1:

Input: s = "aab"
Output: 1
Explanation: The palindrome partitioning ["aa","b"] could be produced using 1 cut.

Example 2:

Input: s = "a"
Output: 0

Example 3:

Input: s = "ab"
Output: 1

Constraints:

1 <= s.length <= 2000
s consists of lowercase English letters only.