Is Rearrange Spaces Between Words easy or hard?

LeetCode classifies the problem as Easy. The challenge mainly involves careful counting of spaces and handling the edge case where the sentence contains only one word.

Rearrange Spaces Between Words Python/Java solution

Python solutions typically use split to extract words and string multiplication to generate spaces. Java implementations often use StringBuilder to construct the result efficiently while iterating through the words.

How to solve Rearrange Spaces Between Words in O(n)?

Traverse the string once to count total spaces and identify words. Compute spaces per gap as totalSpaces divided by (wordCount - 1), and keep the remainder for the end. Rebuild the output string by joining words with the computed gap and appending leftover spaces.

What is the best approach for Rearrange Spaces Between Words?

The split and redistribute approach is the most practical solution. Count the total spaces, extract all words, compute the number of spaces between words using division, and place leftover spaces at the end. This runs in O(n) time and is easy to implement in most languages.

Is Rearrange Spaces Between Words asked at Google/Amazon/Meta?

This problem represents a common string manipulation pattern used in interviews at companies like Amazon and Google. Variations involving whitespace normalization or text formatting appear frequently in coding rounds.

What data structure is used in Rearrange Spaces Between Words?

Most implementations rely on basic string processing and arrays or lists to store extracted words. The algorithm mainly uses counters and sequential traversal rather than complex data structures.

What is the time complexity of Rearrange Spaces Between Words?

The optimal solutions run in O(n) time where n is the length of the input string. The algorithm scans the string to count spaces and words, then constructs the result string in another pass.

Description Hints 1 Solution Video 5:03

1592. Rearrange Spaces Between Words

Easy43.9% acceptance1 company

You are given a string text of words that are placed among some number of spaces. Each word consists of one or more lowercase English letters and are separated by at least one space. It's guaranteed that text contains at least one word.

Rearrange the spaces so that there is an equal number of spaces between every pair of adjacent words and that number is maximized. If you cannot redistribute all the spaces equally, place the extra spaces at the end, meaning the returned string should be the same length as text.

Return the string after rearranging the spaces.

Example 1:

Input: text = "  this   is  a sentence "
Output: "this   is   a   sentence"
Explanation: There are a total of 9 spaces and 4 words. We can evenly divide the 9 spaces between the words: 9 / (4-1) = 3 spaces.

Example 2:

Input: text = " practice   makes   perfect"
Output: "practice   makes   perfect "
Explanation: There are a total of 7 spaces and 3 words. 7 / (3-1) = 3 spaces plus 1 extra space. We place this extra space at the end of the string.

Constraints:

1 <= text.length <= 100
text consists of lowercase English letters and ' '.
text contains at least one word.

Asked at 1 company

Google

Topics

String

Hints open one at a time

Hint 1

Count the total number of spaces and words. Then use the integer division to determine the numbers of spaces to add between each word and at the end.

5:03

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