rahulgurnani/interviews-in-python

Python snippets and implementation of some of the algorithms in python for someone preparing for coding interviews

Algorithms implemented in python

• Merge sort (0(nlogn) sorting)
• Min heap (Native implementation)
• HeapSort (using python's heapq)
• Breadth First Search
• Depth First Search (with cycle detection)
• String pattern matching - rabin karp
• Union find
• min_heap - wrapper around heapq for min heaps
• max_heap - wrapper around heapq for min heaps (using negation of initial values)
• Trie
• Djikstra

TODOs

• Prims
• Kruskal

Commonly used snippets

Print statements

Formatted print

print("My name is {} {}".format(first, last))

Multi - line code

if a or b and c \
or d:
  print("blah")

Sort based on a key

def sortKey(v):
  return v[1]
ls = [(2,7), (5,6)]
ls.sort(key=sortKey) # [(5, 6), (2, 7)]

ASCII to chr

ord('a') # 97

Chr to ASCII

chr(97) # a

Not operators

not, != are valid operators in python. ! is invalid.

Also, not None = True and not 0 = True

List comprehensions

Multiply each element in a list by a number

numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
numbers5 = [i* 5 for i in numbers]

filter and map

strings = ["rahul", "gurnani"]
string_lengths = list(map(len, strings))

numbers = [1, 2, 3, -1, -3]
positive = list(filter(lambda x: x>0, numbers))

Enumerate and items

enumerate(alist) to get i, v

dictionarys.items() to get k, v

String search

s.find(pattern, start)

find method uses Boyer-Moore algorithm.

Concatenating strings

There is a + operator to join 2 strings or we could use s.join([s1, s2, s3]) where s is the separator string and s1, s2, s3 are the strings to be joined. Note that performance of join is better than + operator. The performance is better in case of join method is because the memory allocator allocates memory in one go in case of join method.

Mutable string

TODO

Min/Max heaps in python

In case tuples are given ordering is taken based of first then second element etc. comparisons are done between comparable types of objects only

Sets don’t keep elements in sorted order or in any defined order

Substring of a string

>>> a = ‘rahul’
>>> a[1:3] 
‘ah’
>>> a[1:-1]
ahu

Time Complexity: O(n), a new copy is created when a substring is created

Reversing a string

Using the extended slice syntax: s[::-1] reverses the string

Iterating backwards

for i in reversed(ls):

Infinity

float("inf")

Stack

stack = list()
stack.append(10)
n = stack.pop()

Queue

Use python queue module

import queue
q = queue.Queue()
# insert
q.put(1)
# remove first element
e = q.get()
# peek first element
e = q.queue[0]
# peek last element
q.queue[-1]
# NOTE: q.get() takes infinite time if the queue is empty
len(q.queue) == 0 to check if the queue is empty

OrderedDict, dict and SortedSets?

OrderedDict is a special type of dictionary which maintains keeps the keys in the order they were inserted into the dictionary.

from collections import OrderedDict 
d = OrderedDict()
d['a'] = 'x'

Sorted set

sortedcontainers is a pure python library which has implementation for sorted data structures.

from sortedcontainers import SortedList, SortedSet, SortedDict

l = SortedList([1,2])
l.add(0) # O(logn)
l.discard(1) # deletes value 1 from the list in O(logn)

s = SortedSet(1,5)
s.add(2) # O(logn)
s.discard(1) # O(logn)
if 5 in s:
  print("found")

Graph

defaultdict is often handy,

from collections import defaultdict
edges = [(1, 2), (2, 3)]
graph = defaultdict(list)
for edge in edges:
  graph[edge[0]].append(edge[1])
  graph[edge[1]].append(edge[0])

NOTE: defaultdict(int) will initialize dictionary with default value of any key = 0

Dictionary

key deletion

del mapping['key']

Counter class

Useful if we want count of occurrences of numbers in a list

>>> from collections import Counter
>>> myList = [1,1,2,3,4,5,3,2,3,4,2,1,2,3]
>>> counter = Counter(myList)
>>> counter
Counter({2: 4, 3: 4, 1: 3, 4: 2, 5: 1})
>>> counter.items()
[(1, 3), (2, 4), (3, 4), (4, 2), (5, 1)]
>>> counter.keys()
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
>>> counter.values()
[3, 4, 4, 2, 1]

Copy objects

Suppose you have a 2D array. You want to make copy of this array in order to mutate the array. To make such a copy, you can use deep copy

from copy import copy, deepcopy
x = [[1, 2], [3, 4]]
y = deepcopy(x)

Binary Search

from bisect import bisect_left, bisect_right
a = [1,2,3]
bisect_left(a, 2) # gives 1

String in set in python

strings = set()
strings.add('rahul')
strings.add('something')
'rahul' in strings # O(1) operation

List vs Tuples

Tuples are hashable, lists are not. So, we may need to convert list to tuples.

ls = [1,2,3]
t = tuple(ls)

zip and unzip

Useful if we have 2 lists which we want to combine and do some operations

listpairs = list(zip(list1, list2))
list1, list2 = zip(*listpairs)

Writing multi-threaded programs in python

Synchronizing primitives in python