Question

I have a question about a programming problem from the book Cracking The Code Interview by Gayl Laakmann McDowell, 5th Edition.

The problem states: Write a method to replace all spaces in a string with ‘%20’. Assume string has sufficient space at end of string to hold additional characters, and that you’re given a true length of a string. I used the books code, implementing the solution in Java using a character array (given the fact that Java Strings are immutable):

public class Test {
    public void replaceSpaces(char[] str, int length) {
        int spaceCount = 0, newLength = 0, i = 0;

        for(i = 0; i < length; i++) {
            if (str[i] == ' ') 
                spaceCount++;
        }

        newLength = length + (spaceCount * 2);
        str[newLength] = '\0';
        for(i = length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
            if (str[i] == ' ') {
                str[newLength - 1] = '0';
                str[newLength - 2] = '2';
                str[newLength - 3] = '%';
                newLength = newLength - 3;
            }
            else {
                str[newLength - 1] = str[i];
                newLength = newLength - 1;
            }
        }
        System.out.println(str);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Test tst = new Test();
        char[] ch = {'t', 'h', 'e', ' ', 'd', 'o', 'g', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' '};
        int length = 6;
        tst.replaceSpaces(ch, length);  
    }
}

The output I am getting from the replaceSpaces() call is: the%20do which is cutting of the last character of the original array. I have been scratching my head over this, can anyone explain to me why the algorithm is doing this?

Answer 1

You are passing the length as 6, which is causing this. Pass length as 7 including space.
Other wise

for(i = length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {

will not consider last char.