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Coding & Algorithms questions require understanding of core concepts and practice. PracHub provides solutions with explanations to help you master coding & algorithms interviews.

What difficulty level is this interview question?

This is a medium difficulty Coding & Algorithms question, commonly asked during Technical Screen rounds at Uber.

What role is this question designed for?

This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Uber during technical interviews.

Bracket substrings matching any pattern

Q: Bracket substrings matching any pattern

This question evaluates string manipulation and pattern-matching competency, including substring search, prioritization rules for leftmost and longest matches, and handling of edge cases.

Problem

You are given a sentence s (words separated by single spaces) and a list of strings patterns.

For each word in the sentence, if the word contains any pattern as a contiguous substring, wrap the matched substring in square brackets [ and ].

If a word contains multiple possible matches (different patterns and/or different positions), choose the match with the smallest start index (leftmost occurrence).
If there is still a tie (same start index), choose the longest matching pattern.
If a word contains no pattern, leave it unchanged.
Matching is case-sensitive .

Return the transformed sentence.

Example

Input: s = "hello uber" , patterns = ["ll", "ub"]
Output: "he[ll]o [ub]er"

Constraints (reasonable interview assumptions)

1 <= len(s) <= 10^5
1 <= len(patterns) <= 10^4
Total length of all patterns <= 10^5
Words contain only printable non-space characters.

Function signature (language-agnostic)

transform(s: string, patterns: list[string]) -> string

Problem

You are given a sentence s (words separated by single spaces) and a list of strings patterns.

For each word in the sentence, if the word contains any pattern as a contiguous substring, wrap the matched substring in square brackets [ and ].

If a word contains multiple possible matches (different patterns and/or different positions), choose the match with the smallest start index (leftmost occurrence).

If there is still a tie (same start index), choose the longest matching pattern.

If a word contains no pattern, leave it unchanged.

Matching is case-sensitive .

Return the transformed sentence.

Bracket substrings matching any pattern

Quick Overview

Problem

Example

Constraints (reasonable interview assumptions)

Function signature (language-agnostic)

Submit Your Answer

Bracket substrings matching any pattern

Quick Overview

Problem

Example

Constraints (reasonable interview assumptions)

Function signature (language-agnostic)

Submit Your Answer