FastPrep
Problem · String

Text Justification

● HardGoogleFULLTIMEPHONE SCREEN
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The source mentioned that the actual question asked during the phone screen was "very" similar to LeetCode 68 (Text Justification).

Another question asked was: Given a text dataset that needs to be formatted into a two-column table on a fixed-width page, determine the optimal column size that minimizes the overall table height.

This was a follow-up question, and I provided a solution using Binary Search.

Given an array of strings words and a width maxWidth, format the text such that each line has exactly maxWidth characters and is fully (left and right) justified.

You should pack your words in a greedy approach; that is, pack as many words as you can in each line. Pad extra spaces ' ' when necessary so that each line has exactly maxWidth characters.

Extra spaces between words should be distributed as evenly as possible. If the number of spaces on a line does not divide evenly between words, the empty slots on the left will be assigned more spaces than the slots on the right.

For the last line of text, it should be left-justified, and no extra space is inserted between words.

Note:

  • A word is defined as a character sequence consisting of non-space characters only.
  • Each word's length is guaranteed to be greater than 0 and not exceed maxWidth.
  • The input array words contains at least one word.

Examples
01 · Example 1
words = ["This", "is", "an", "example", "of", "text", "justification."]
maxWidth = 16
return = ["This    is    an", "example  of text", "justification.  "]

The words are arranged such that each line has exactly 16 characters and is fully justified.

02 · Example 2
words = ["What","must","be","acknowledgment","shall","be"]
maxWidth = 16
return = ["What   must   be", "acknowledgment  ", "shall be        "]

Note that the last line is "shall be " instead of "shall be", because the last line must be left-justified instead of fully-justified. Note that the second line is also left-justified because it contains only one word.

03 · Example 3
words = ["Science","is","what","we","understand","well","enough","to","explain","to","a","computer.","Art","is","everything","else","we","do"]
maxWidth = 20
return = ["Science  is  what we", "understand     well", "enough to explain to", "a  computer. Art is", "everything else  we", "do                "]

The words are arranged such that each line has exactly 20 characters and is fully justified.

Constraints
  • 1 <= words.length <= 300
  • 1 <= words[i].length <= 20
  • words[i] consists of only English letters and symbols.
  • 1 <= maxWidth <= 100
  • words[i].length <= maxWidth
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public List<String> fullJustify(String[] words, int maxWidth) {
  // write your code here
}
words["This", "is", "an", "example", "of", "text", "justification."]
maxWidth16
expected["This is an", "example of text", "justification. "]
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