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Competition Arena > ForumPostEasy

ForumPostEasy

TCO 19 SRM 739 · 2018-10-09 · by Blue.Mary

TCO 19 SRM 739 · 2018-10-09 · by Blue.Mary · Brute Force, String Manipulation, String Parsing
Class Name: ForumPostEasy
Return Type: String
Method Name: getCurrentTime
Arg Types: (vector<string>, vector<string>)
Problem Statement

Problem Statement

In this problem we are using 24-hour time. That is, the first second of each day is 00:00:00 and the last second of each day is 23:59:59.

You are visiting an online forum. Whenever there is a post that has been made strictly less than 24 hours ago, the forum displays a human-readable message stating when it was made. There are three types of messages:

  • "few seconds ago", which means the post is made between 0 and 59 seconds ago, inclusive.
  • "X minutes ago", where X is an integer between 1 and 59, inclusive, which means the post is made between X minutes and X minutes 59 seconds ago, inclusive.
  • "X hours ago", where X is an integer between 1 and 23, inclusive, which means the post is made between X hours and X hours 59 minutes 59 seconds ago, inclusive.

You are given the String[]s exactPostTime and showPostTime, both with the same number of elements. For each valid index i you know the following information:

  • Post i was made strictly less than 24 hours ago.
  • The exact time of day when post i was made is exactPostTime[i].
  • The human-readable string currently displayed by the forum software about post i is showPostTime[i].

Given all the information above, what is the current time?

Return the answer in the format "HH:MM:SS". If there are multiple solutions, return the one that comes first lexicographically. If the information given to you is self-contradictory and there is no solution, return "impossible" instead.

Notes

  • The lexicographically smaller of two equally-long strings is the one that has a character with a smaller ASCII value at the first index at which they differ.

Constraints

  • exactPostTime will contain between 0 and 50 elements, inclusive.
  • Each element of exactPostTime will be formatted as HH:MM:SS where HH is a two-digit integer between 00 and 23, inclusive, and both MM and SS are two-digit integers between 00 and 59, inclusive.
  • exactPostTime and showPostTime will contain same number of elements.
  • Each element of showPostTime will have one of the formats described in problem statment.
Examples
0)
{"12:12:12"}
{"few seconds ago"}
Returns: "12:12:12"

The current time is somewhere between 12:12:12 and 12:13:11, inclusive. The returned time is the lexicographically smallest one out of all these times.

1)
{"23:23:23","23:23:23"}
{"59 minutes ago","59 minutes ago"}
Returns: "00:22:23"

Both posts were made on the previous day. The current time is a bit after midnight.

2)
{"00:10:10","00:10:10"}
{"59 minutes ago","1 hours ago"}
Returns: "impossible"

Two posts made in the same second cannot have two different human-readable strings.

3)
{"11:59:13","11:13:23","12:25:15"}
{"few seconds ago","46 minutes ago","23 hours ago"}
Returns: "11:59:23"

The post made at 12:25:15 was posted yesterday at that time of day.

4)
{}
{}
Returns: "00:00:00"

Submissions are judged against all 36 archived test cases, of which 5 are shown here. Case numbers match the judge’s.

Coding Area

Language: C++17 · define a public class ForumPostEasy with a public method string getCurrentTime(vector<string> exactPostTime, vector<string> showPostTime) · 36 test cases · 2 s / 256 MB per case

Submitting as anonymous