926. Flip String to Monotone Increasing

Description

A string of '0’s and '1’s is monotone increasing if it consists of some number of '0’s (possibly 0), followed by some number of '1’s (also possibly 0.)

We are given a string S of '0’s and '1’s, and we may flip any ‘0’ to a ‘1’ or a ‘1’ to a ‘0’.

Return the minimum number of flips to make S monotone increasing.

Example 1:

Input: “00110”
Output: 1
Explanation: We flip the last digit to get 00111.
Example 2:

Input: “010110”
Output: 2
Explanation: We flip to get 011111, or alternatively 000111.
Example 3:

Input: “00011000”
Output: 2
Explanation: We flip to get 00000000.

Note:

1 <= S.length <= 20000
S only consists of ‘0’ and ‘1’ characters.

Problem URL

Solution

当一个String只有0构成或是一串0followed一串1，它是单调递增的。可以将0变为1，或者把1flip为0，问最少动几次可以成为递增的。

It is a dynamic programming problem. Use two counter, flipCount denotes time to flip, onesCount is the number of ‘1’ we have encounter now. Jump out leading zeros. After we met a 1, if we met 0, we want to flip it. If the flip time is more than onesCount, we want to flip previous one for less flip operation, flipCount = onesCount. In the rest iteration, only when we met more 1, we could filp more 0.

Code

class Solution {
    public int minFlipsMonoIncr(String S) {
        char[] chars = S.toCharArray();
        int onesCount = 0;
        int flipCount = 0;
        
        for (int i = 0; i < chars.length; i++){
            if (chars[i] == '0'){
                if (onesCount == 0){
                    continue;
                }
                flipCount++;
            }
            else{
                onesCount++;
            }
            if (flipCount > onesCount){
                flipCount = onesCount;
            }
        }
        return flipCount;
    }
}

Time Complexity: O(n)
Space Complexity: O(n)

Review