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This is a hard difficulty Coding & Algorithms question, commonly asked during Onsite rounds at Netflix.

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This question is commonly asked for Data Engineer candidates at Netflix during technical interviews.

Implement phrase search and JSON path | Netflix Interview Question

Quick Overview

This question evaluates the ability to build an inverted index for in-memory exact phrase search and to implement JSON path traversal with wildcard matching, testing competency in data structures, string normalization and tokenization, and recursive or iterative traversal of nested maps.

The coding rounds included two concrete implementation tasks:

In-memory document phrase search
- You are given a list of documents, each represented as a string.
- Preprocess the corpus into an inverted index that maps each normalized word to the document IDs and word positions where it appears.
- Implement search(query) :
  - If query contains one word, return all documents containing that word.
  - If query contains multiple words, return only documents that contain the exact phrase in consecutive positions.
- Assume case-insensitive matching and whitespace tokenization.
JSON path query with wildcards
- You are given a nested JSON-like object represented as Map<String, Object> , where values may be scalars or nested maps.
- Implement getValue(json, path) for paths such as .contacts.cell , contacts.* , or .*.cell .
- The token * matches any key at the current level.
- If the path does not exist, return null .
- If a wildcard matches multiple branches, return all matched results in a list.
- Handle edge cases such as leading dots, missing keys, and wildcards at the end of the path.

Implement phrase search and JSON path

Quick Overview

Implement phrase search and JSON path

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