C++17 STL Cookbook by Unknown

Author:Unknown [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Compressing and decompressing strings

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This section deals with a relatively popular task in coding interviews. The basic idea is a function, which takes a string like "aaaaabbbbbbbccc" and transforms it to a shorter string "a5b7c3". It is "a5" because there are five 'a' characters. And then it is "b7" because there are seven 'b' characters. This is a very simple compression algorithm. For normal text, it is of reduced utility because normal language is usually not so repetitive that its text representation would become shorter with this compression scheme. However, it is relatively easy to implement even if we have to do it on a whiteboard without a computer. The tricky part is that it is easy to write a buggy code if the program is not structured very well from the beginning. Dealing with strings is generally not a hard thing, but the chances of implementing buffer overflow bugs lurk around a lot here if legacy C-style formatting functions are used.

Let's try an STL approach to implementing string compression and decompression using this simple scheme.

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