605. Can Place Flowers

Tags: #array #greedy #easy

Problem Statement

You have a long flowerbed in which some of the plots are planted, and some are not. However, flowers cannot be planted in adjacent plots.

Given an integer array flowerbed containing 0's and 1's, where 0 means empty and 1 means not empty, and an integer n, return true if n new flowers can be planted in the flowerbed without violating the no-adjacent-flowers rule and false otherwise.

Input: flowerbed = [1,0,0,0,1], n = 2
Output: false

My approach

def func(array, n):
    count = 0
    i = 0
    while i<len(array):
        if array[i] == 1 or array[i+1]==1 or array[i+2]==1:
            i+=1
        else:
            count +=1
            i+=2
    if count == n:
        return True
    return False

In my approach, I just made a loop so that it checked whether the current element, the next element and the next-next element is one upon which we iterate over to the next element otherwise, we increment the count and iterate over to the next-next element since, the next element has already been checked. After the loop, if the counter variable is equals to the given number then, we return True otherwise False

Personal Thoughts

Another Trivial question. The initial concept was quite interesting to figure out and luckily the implementation worked once we (Me and My Friend) thought about the problem properly.