Skip to main content

1143 - Longest Common Subsequence (Medium)

https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-common-subsequence

Problem Statement

Given two strings text1 and text2, return the length of their longest common subsequence. If there is no common subsequence, return 0.

A subsequence of a string is a new string generated from the original string with some characters (can be none) deleted without changing the relative order of the remaining characters.

  • For example, "ace" is a subsequence of "abcde".

A common subsequence of two strings is a subsequence that is common to both strings.

Example 1:

Input: text1 = "abcde", text2 = "ace" 
Output: 3
Explanation: The longest common subsequence is "ace" and its length is 3.

Example 2:

Input: text1 = "abc", text2 = "abc"
Output: 3
Explanation: The longest common subsequence is "abc" and its length is 3.

Example 3:

Input: text1 = "abc", text2 = "def"
Output: 0
Explanation: There is no such common subsequence, so the result is 0.

Constraints:

  • 1 <= text1.length, text2.length <= 1000
  • text1 and text2 consist of only lowercase English characters.

Approach 1: DP

LCS is a classic problem. Let dp[i][j]dp[i][j] be the LCS for string text1text1 ends at index ii and string text2text2 ends at index jj. If text1[i]==text2[j]text1[i] == text2[j], then dp[i][j]dp[i][j] would be 1+dp[i1][j1]1 + dp[i - 1][j - 1]. Otherwise, we target the largest LCS if we skip one character from either text1text1 or text2text2, i.e. dp[i][j]=max(dp[i1][j],dp[i][j1])dp[i][j] = max(dp[i - 1][j], dp[i][j - 1]).

Written by @wingkwong
class Solution {
public:
int longestCommonSubsequence(string text1, string text2) {
int n = text1.size(), m = text2.size();
vector<vector<int>> dp(n + 1, vector<int>(m + 1));
for(int i = 1; i <= n; i++) {
for(int j = 1; j <= m; j++) {
if(text1[i - 1] == text2[j - 1]) {
dp[i][j] = dp[i - 1][j - 1] + 1;
} else {
dp[i][j] = max(dp[i - 1][j], dp[i][j - 1]);
}
}
}
return dp[n][m];
}
};