Encode and Decode Strings
Design an algorithm to encode a list of strings into a single string and then decode the string back into the original list of strings. The encoded string should be as short as possible.
Constraints:
- The input list of strings will not be empty.
- Each string in the input list will not be empty.
- The total length of all strings in the input list will not exceed 1000 characters.
Examples:
Input: ["hello","world"]
Output: ["hello","world"]
Explanation: The encoded string can be "hello\nworld" where \n is the delimiter. The decoder can split the string by \n to get the original list of strings.
Solutions
Delimiter-Based Encoding
The idea is to use a delimiter to separate the strings in the encoded string. The delimiter can be a special character that is not present in any of the input strings. In this case, we use \n as the delimiter. The encoder joins all the strings with \n and the decoder splits the string by \n to get the original list of strings.
def encode(strs):
return "\n".join(strs)
def decode(s):
return s.split("\n")Follow-up:
How would you handle the case where the input strings contain the delimiter?
