Problem Description

You are provided with two inputs: a string s and an integer array indices. The length of both s and indices is equal, implying that for every character in s, there is a corresponding element in indices. The problem requires you to 'shuffle' or rearrange the characters in s based on the values in indices. Specifically, each character from the original string s should be placed at a new position in a resulting string, such that if the ith character in the original string is s[i], it will be moved to the position indices[i] in the shuffled string. The output should be the shuffled string obtained after rearranging the characters of s as stated.

For example, if s = "abc" and indices = [1, 2, 0], the shuffled string would rearrange a to index 1, b to index 2, and c to index 0, resulting in the string "cab".

Intuition

To solve this problem, the intuition is to simulate the shuffling process described. Since you have a mapping from the original indices of s to the shuffled indices via the indices array, you can create a new list, initially filled with placeholders (for example, zeroes), with the same length as s. You can then iterate over the string s and for each character s[i], place it at the index specified by indices[i] in the new list. This directly implements the shuffling process. Once this operation is completed for all characters, you simply need to join the list's elements to form the shuffled string.

The reason why using a list for the output is beneficial is because strings in Python are immutable, meaning you cannot change characters at specific indices without creating a new string. On the other hand, lists are mutable, allowing you to assign new values at specific indices, which is perfect for this shuffling algorithm. After the shuffling is done, the join method is used to convert the list of characters back into a string, because the final expected output is a string, not a list.

Thus, the solution simply follows the exact process of assigning each character to its new index and then converts the result back into the string format.

Solution Approach

The solution presented uses a straightforward array manipulation approach to implement the shuffle. Let's walk through the implementation step by step.

1. Creating a placeholder list: The first step in the solution is to create a new list ans with the same length as the input string s. This list is populated with zeros or placeholders, but the exact values don't matter since they'll be overwritten. The purpose of this list is to store the characters of s at their new positions. This is done by:

ans = [0] * len(s)

2. Enumerating the original string: We then use a loop to go through each character and its corresponding original index in the string s. This is achieved with the enumerate() function, which gives us each character c and its index i.

for i, c in enumerate(s):

3. Placing each character at the new index: Within the loop, we access the shuffling index for the current character from the indices list using indices[i]. The character c is then assigned to the placeholder list ans at this new index. The line of code that does this is:

    ans[indices[i]] = c

By assigning to ans[indices[i]], we ensure that each character from the original string s is placed according to the shuffled indices provided by the indices list.

4. Converting the list back to a string: After the loop completes, all of the characters are in their correct shuffled positions in the list ans. The last step is to join the list of characters into a single string, which gives us the shuffled string required by the problem. The join() method is perfectly suited for this, as it concatenates a list of strings into a single string without any separators (since we're dealing with single characters).

return ''.join(ans)

No additional data structures, patterns, or complex algorithms are necessary for this solution. By leveraging the mutable nature of lists and the ability to directly assign to indices, the task is done efficiently and in a manner that is easy to read and understand.

Example Walkthrough

Let's illustrate the solution approach by walking through a small example. Assume we have the following inputs: s = "Leet", and indices = [2, 0, 3, 1]

Following the solution approach:

1. Creating a placeholder list: We create an empty list ans with the same length as s, filled with zeros (which will be placeholders in this case).

   ans = [0] * len(s)  # ans = [0, 0, 0, 0]

2. Enumerating the original string: Using the enumerate() function to loop through s, we get index i and character c for each iteration.

   The enumerate() function would provide the following pairs: (0, 'L'), (1, 'e'), (2, 'e'), (3, 't').

3. Placing each character at the new index: For each index-character pair (i, c), we place character c at the index given by indices[i] in the list ans. The loop would look like the following:

   For (0, 'L'):

   ans[indices[0]] = 'L'  # ans[2] = 'L', now ans = [0, 0, 'L', 0]

   For (1, 'e'):

   ans[indices[1]] = 'e'  # ans[0] = 'e', now ans = ['e', 0, 'L', 0]

   For (2, 'e'):

   ans[indices[2]] = 'e'  # ans[3] = 'e', now ans = ['e', 0, 'L', 'e']

   For (3, 't'):

   ans[indices[3]] = 't'  # ans[1] = 't', now ans = ['e', 't', 'L', 'e']

   After this step, each character from the string s has been moved to its new index specified by indices.

4. Converting the list back to a string: All characters are now in the correct position in the list ans. We convert ans back to a string using the join() method:

   shuffled_string = ''.join(ans)  # shuffled_string = "etLe"

The final output shuffled_string is "etLe", which is the shuffled result of the string "Leet" according to the indices [2, 0, 3, 1].

Solution Implementation

Time and Space Complexity

Time Complexity

The time complexity of the provided function is O(n), where n is the length of the string s. The function iterates through each character of the string exactly once, which means the number of operations grows linearly with the size of the input string.

Space Complexity

The space complexity of the function is also O(n), since it creates a list ans of the same length as the input string to store the rearranged characters. This means the amount of additional memory used by the program is directly proportional to the input size.

Learn more about how to find time and space complexity quickly using problem constraints.