#271 Encode and Decode Strings

Link

https://leetcode.com/problems/encode-and-decode-strings/description/

Solution

1. I just used all the punctuations given by string.punctuation in python as the delimiter. Obvious flaw here; if the same kind of string exists in the actual string, it is going to read it as a delimiter. (It was one of those days. Tired + no motivation; but can’t miss two days in a row hehe)
2. To combat that, there’s an approach which is agnostic to the type of delimeter Reference
   1. rather it sequentially looks for a number followed by a special character (@).
   2. For the next number of letters, it reads the string and appends it to the list.
   3. Repeat the above steps till you reach the end of the string.

Code

Python

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class Codec:
    def encode(self, strs: List[str]) -> str:
        """Encodes a list of strings to a single string.
        """
        all_puncts = string.punctuation
        return all_puncts.join(strs)

    def decode(self, s: str) -> List[str]:
        """Decodes a single string to a list of strings.
        """
        return s.split(string.punctuation)

Notes

1. The one and only Stefan Pochmann has commented on the reference user solution. Pretty handy tip :)