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Rearrange Spaces Between Words

Difficulty: Easy

Problem Description

You are given a string text of words that are placed among some number of spaces. Each word consists of one or more lowercase English letters and are separated by at least one space. It's guaranteed that text contains at least one word. Rearrange the spaces so that there is an equal number of spaces between every pair of adjacent words and that number is maximized. If you cannot redistribute all the spaces equally, place the extra spaces at the end, meaning the returned string should be the same length as text. Return the string after rearranging the spaces.

Key Insights

  • Count the total number of spaces in the input string.
  • Split the input string into words to determine how many words there are.
  • Calculate the maximum number of spaces that can be placed between words.
  • Distribute the spaces evenly between the words and place any remaining spaces at the end of the string.

Space and Time Complexity

Time Complexity: O(n), where n is the length of the input string. Space Complexity: O(n), for storing the split words and the final result.

Solution

To solve this problem, we can use the following steps:

  1. Count the total number of spaces in the input string.
  2. Split the input string into words to determine the number of words.
  3. Calculate the maximum number of spaces to be placed between each pair of adjacent words using integer division of the total spaces by the number of gaps (number of words - 1).
  4. Construct the final string by adding the words and the calculated spaces, and append any remaining spaces at the end.

Code Solutions

def rearrangeSpaces(text: str) -> str:
    # Count total spaces
    total_spaces = text.count(' ')
    # Split the text into words
    words = text.split()
    # Number of gaps between words
    gaps = len(words) - 1
    
    if gaps > 0:
        # Calculate spaces to distribute evenly
        spaces_between = total_spaces // gaps
        # Calculate remaining spaces
        extra_spaces = total_spaces % gaps
        # Join words with calculated spaces
        return (' ' * spaces_between).join(words) + ' ' * extra_spaces
    else:
        # If there is only one word, return it with all spaces at the end
        return words[0] + ' ' * total_spaces
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