Check if a string is rotation of another WITHOUT concatenating - string

Question

There are 2 strings , how can we check if one is a rotated version of another ?
For Example : hello --- lohel
One simple solution is by concatenating first string with itself and checking if the other one is a substring of the concatenated version.
Is there any other solution to it ?
I was wondering if we could use circular linked list maybe ? But I am not able to arrive at the solution.

Answer 1

One simple solution is by concatenating them and checking if the other one is a substring of the concatenated version.
I assume you mean concatenate the first string with itself, then check if the other one is a substring of that concatenation.
That will work, and in fact can be done without any concatenation at all. Just use any string searching algorithm to search for the second string in the first, and when you reach the end, loop back to the beginning.
For instance, using Boyer-Moore the overall algorithm would be O(n).

Answer 2

There's no need to concatenate at all.
First, check the lengths. If they're different then return false.
Second, use an index that increments from the first character to the last of the source. Check if the destination starts with all the letters from the index to the end, and ends with all the letters before the index. If at any time this is true, return true.
Otherwise, return false.
EDIT:
An implementation in Python:
def isrot(src, dest):
# Make sure they have the same size
if len(src) != len(dest):
return False
# Rotate through the letters in src
for ix in range(len(src)):
# Compare the end of src with the beginning of dest
# and the beginning of src with the end of dest
if dest.startswith(src[ix:]) and dest.endswith(src[:ix]):
return True
return False
print isrot('hello', 'lohel')
print isrot('hello', 'lohell')
print isrot('hello', 'hello')
print isrot('hello', 'lohe')

Answer 3

You could compute the lexicographically minimal string rotation of each string and then test if they were equal.
Computing the minimal rotation is O(n).
This would be good if you had lots of strings to test as the minimal rotation could be applied as a preprocessing step and then you could use a standard hash table to store the rotated strings.

Answer 4

Trivial O(min(n,m)^2) algorithm: (n - length of S1, m - length of S2)
isRotated(S1 , S2):
if (S1.length != S2.length)
return false
for i : 0 to n-1
res = true
index = i
for j : 0 to n-1
if S1[j] != S2[index]
res = false
break
index = (index+1)%n
if res == true
return true
return false
EDIT:
Explanation -
Two strings S1 and S2 of lengths m and n respectively are cyclic identical if and only if m == n and exist index 0 <= j <= n-1 such S1 = S[j]S[j+1]...S[n-1]S[0]...S[j-1].
So in the above algorithm we check if the length is equal and if exist such an index.

Answer 5

A very straightforward solution is to rotate one of the words n times, where n is the length of the word. For each of those rotations, check to see if the result is the same as the other word.

Answer 6

You can do it in O(n) time and O(1) space:
def is_rot(u, v):
n, i, j = len(u), 0, 0
if n != len(v):
return False
while i < n and j < n:
k = 1
while k <= n and u[(i + k) % n] == v[(j + k) % n]:
k += 1
if k > n:
return True
if u[(i + k) % n] > v[(j + k) % n]:
i += k
else:
j += k
return False
See my answer here for more details.

Answer 7

Simple solution in Java. No need of iteration or concatenation.
private static boolean isSubString(String first, String second){
int firstIndex = second.indexOf(first.charAt(0));
if(first.length() == second.length() && firstIndex > -1){
if(first.equalsIgnoreCase(second))
return true;
int finalPos = second.length() - firstIndex ;
return second.charAt(0) == first.charAt(finalPos)
&& first.substring(finalPos).equals(second.subSequence(0, firstIndex));
}
return false;
}
Test case:
String first = "bottle";
String second = "tlebot";
Logic:
Take the first string's first character, find the index in the second string. Subtract the length of the second with the index found, check if first character of the second at 0 is same as character at the difference of length of the second and index found and substrings between those 2 characters are the same.

Answer 8

Another python implementation (without concatenation) although not efficient but it's O(n), looking forward for comments if any.
Assume that there are two strings s1 and s2.
Obviously, if s1 and s2 are rotations, there exists two sub strings of s2 in s1, the sum of them will total to the length of the string.
The question is to find that partition for which I increment an index in s2 whenever a char of s2 matches with that of s1.
def is_rotation(s1, s2):
if len(s1) != len(s2):
return False
n = len(s1)
if n == 0: return True
j = 0
for i in range(n):
if s2[j] == s1[i]:
j += 1
return (j > 0 and s1[:n - j] == s2[j:] and s1[n - j:] == s2[:j])
The second and condition is just to ensure that the counter incremented for s2 are a sub string match.

Answer 9

input1= "hello" input2="llohe" input3="lohel"(input3 is special case)
if length's of input 1 & input2 are not same return 0.Let i and j be two indexes pointing to input1 and input2 respectively and initialize count to input1.length. Have a flag called isRotated which is set to false
while(count != 0){
When the character's of input1 matches input2
increment i & j
decrement count
If the character's donot match
if isRotated = true(it means even after rotation there's mismatch) so break;
else Reset j to 0 as there's a mismatch. Eg:
Please find the code below and let me know if it fails for some other combination I may not have considered.
public boolean isRotation(String input1, String input2) {
boolean isRotated = false;
int i = 0, j = 0, count = input1.length();
if (input1.length() != input2.length())
return false;
while (count != 0) {
if (i == input1.length() && !isRotated) {
isRotated = true;
i = 0;
}
if (input1.charAt(i) == input2.charAt(j)) {
i++;
j++;
count--;
}
else {
if (isRotated) {
break;
}
if (i == input1.length() - 1 && !isRotated) {
isRotated = true;
}
if (i < input1.length()) {
j = 0;
count = input1.length();
}
/* To handle the duplicates. This is the special case.
* This occurs when input1 contains two duplicate elements placed side-by-side as "ll" in "hello" while
* they may not be side-by-side in input2 such as "lohel" but are still valid rotations.
Eg: "hello" "lohel"
*/
if (input1.charAt(i) == input2.charAt(j)) {
i--;
}
i++;
}
}
if (count == 0)
return true;
return false;
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
System.out.println(new StringRotation().isRotation("harry potter",
"terharry pot"));
System.out.println(new StringRotation().isRotation("hello", "llohe"));
System.out.println(new StringRotation().isRotation("hello", "lohell"));
System.out.println(new StringRotation().isRotation("hello", "hello"));
System.out.println(new StringRotation().isRotation("hello", "lohe"));
}

Answer 10

Solving the problem in O(n)
void isSubstring(string& s1, string& s2)
{
if(s1.length() != s2.length())
cout<<"Not rotation string"<<endl;
else
{
int firstI=0, secondI=0;
int len = s1.length();
while( firstI < len )
{
if(s1[firstI%len] == s2[0] && s1[(firstI+1) %len] == s2[1])
break;
firstI = (firstI+1)%len;
}
int len2 = s2.length();
int i=0;
bool isSubString = true;
while(i < len2)
{
if(s1[firstI%len] != s2[i])
{
isSubString = false;
break;
}
i++;
}
if(isSubString)
cout<<"Is Rotation String"<<endl;
else
cout<<"Is not a rotation string"<<endl;
}
}

Answer 11

String source = "avaraavar";
String dest = "ravaraava";
System.out.println();
if(source.length()!=dest.length())
try {
throw (new IOException());
} catch (Exception e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
int i = 0;
int j = 0;
int totalcount=0;
while(true)
{
i=i%source.length();
if(source.charAt(i)==dest.charAt(j))
{
System.out.println("i="+i+" , j = "+j);
System.out.println(source.charAt(i)+"=="+dest.charAt(j));
i++;
j++;
totalcount++;
}
else
{
System.out.println("i="+i+" , j = "+j);
System.out.println(source.charAt(i)+"!="+dest.charAt(j));
i++;
totalcount++;
j=0;
}
if(j==source.length())
{
System.out.println("Yes its a rotation");
break;
}
if(totalcount >(2*source.length())-1)
{
System.out.println("No its a rotation");
break;
}
}