Contiguous Array

Introduction Link to heading

Given a binary array, find the maximum length of a contiguous subarray with equal number of 0 and 1.

Example 1:

Input: [0,1]
Output: 2
Explanation: [0, 1] is the longest contiguous subarray with equal number of 0 and 1.

Example 2:

Input: [0,1,0]
Output: 2
Explanation: [0, 1] (or [1, 0]) is a longest contiguous subarray with equal number of 0 and 1.
Note: The length of the given binary array will not exceed 50,000.

Solution Link to heading

Let’s use the map to cache visited steps.

func findMaxLength(nums []int) int {
	n := len(nums)
	if n <= 1 {
		return 0
	}
	cache := make(map[int]int)
	cache[0] = -1

	maxSoFar := 0
	ones := 0
	for i, num := range nums {
		ones += num
		zeros := i - ones + 1
		diff := zeros - ones
		if _, ok := cache[diff]; !ok {
			cache[diff] = i
		}
		opposite := ones - zeros
		if j, ok := cache[-opposite]; ok {
			maxSoFar = max(maxSoFar, i - j)
		}
	}

	return maxSoFar
}

func max(a, b int) int {
	if a > b {
		return a
	} else {
		return b
	}
}

Performance

Runtime: 104 ms
Memory Usage: 7.5 MB