Greplin issued a programming challenge recently that required programmers to solve three problems; when completed, Greplin issued an invitation to send them a resume. The first problem required the programmer to find the longest palindrome in the following 1169-character string:
Fourscoreandsevenyearsagoourfaathersbroughtforthonthisconta
inentanewnationconceivedinzLibertyanddedicatedtotheproposit
ionthatallmenarecreatedequalNowweareengagedinagreahtcivilwa
rtestingwhetherthatnaptionoranynartionsoconceivedandsodedic
atedcanlongendureWeareqmetonagreatbattlefiemldoftzhatwarWeh
avecometodedicpateaportionofthatfieldasafinalrestingplacefo
rthosewhoheregavetheirlivesthatthatnationmightliveItisaltog
etherfangandproperthatweshoulddothisButinalargersensewecann
otdedicatewecannotconsecratewecannothallowthisgroundThebrav
elmenlivinganddeadwhostruggledherehaveconsecrateditfarabove
ourpoorponwertoaddordetractTgheworldadswfilllittlenotlenorl
ongrememberwhatwesayherebutitcanneverforgetwhattheydidhereI
tisforusthelivingrathertobededicatedheretotheulnfinishedwor
kwhichtheywhofoughtherehavethusfarsonoblyadvancedItisrather
forustobeherededicatedtothegreattdafskremainingbeforeusthat
fromthesehonoreddeadwetakeincreaseddevotiontothatcauseforwh
ichtheygavethelastpfullmeasureofdevotionthatweherehighlyres
olvethatthesedeadshallnothavediedinvainthatthisnationunsder
Godshallhaveanewbirthoffreedomandthatgovernmentofthepeopleb
ythepeopleforthepeopleshallnotperishfromtheearth
Your task is to write a function that finds the longest palindrome in a string and apply it to the string given above. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
There are several ways to attack this problem. The easiest is to form all possible substrings of the original, test each substring to see if it is a palindrome, and keep the longest. That’s an O(n3
View original post 500 more words
rajispassionate 