Question

I have two strings with me:

s1="MICROSOFT"
s2="APPLESOFT"

I need to compare the strings and remove the duplicate part (always towards the end) from the second string. So I should get “MICROSOFT” and “APPLE” as output.

I have compared both the strings character by character.

               String s1 = "MICROSOFT";
               String s2 = "APPLESOFT";

               for(int j=0; j<s1.length(); j++)
               {
                   char c1 = s1.charAt(j);
                   char c2 = s2.charAt(j);

                   if(c1==c2)
                       System.out.println("Match found!!!");
                   else
                       System.out.println("No match found!");
               }

It should check the strings and if the two strings have same characters until the end of string, then I need to remove that redundant part, SOFT in this case, from the second string. But I can’t think of how to proceed from here.

There can be more duplicates…but we have to remove only those which are continuously identical. if i have APPWWSOFT and APPLESOFT, i should get APPLE again in the second string since we got LE different than WW in between

Can you guys please help me out here?

Answer 1

I have solved my problem after racking some brains off. Please feel free to correct/improve/refine my code. The code not only works for “MICROSOFT” and “APPLESOFT” inputs, but also for inputs like “APPWWSOFT” and “APPLESOFT” (i needed to remove the continuous duplicates from the end – SOFT in both the above inputs). I’m in the learning stage and I’ll appreciate any valuable inputs.

public class test
    {           
        public static void main(String[] args)
        {
            String s1 = "MICROSOFT";
            String s2 = "APPLESOFT";

            int counter1=0;
            int counter2=0;

            String[] test = new String[100];
            test[0]="";

            for(int j=0; j<s1.length(); j++)
            {
                char c1 = s1.charAt(j);
                char c2 = s2.charAt(j);

                if(c1==c2)
                {
                    if(counter1==counter2)
                    {
                        //System.out.println("Match found!!!");
                        test[0]=test[0]+c2;
                        counter2++;
                        //System.out.println("Counter 2: "+counter2);
                    }
                    else
                        test[0]="";
                }
               else
               {
                   //System.out.print("No match found!");
                   //System.out.println("Counter 2: "+counter2);
                   counter2=counter1+1;
                   test[0]="";
               }

               counter1++;
               //System.out.println("Counter 1: "+counter1);
                           }

             System.out.println(test[0]);
             System.out.println(s2.replaceAll(test[0]," "));
        }
    }