Hi everyone,
I recently participated in a coding test for a software development role and encountered an intriguing problem. It's an advanced version of the LeetCode question 2131. Longest Palindrome by Concatenating Two Letter Words.
For those unfamiliar with the original question, here's a brief description:
You are given an array of strings words. Each element of words consists of two lowercase English letters. Create the longest possible palindrome by selecting some elements from words and concatenating them in any order. Each element can be selected at most once.
Return the length of the longest palindrome that you can create. If it is impossible to create any palindrome, return 0.
A palindrome is a string that reads the same forward and backward.
In the advanced version I faced, the constraints are relaxed so that words can be of any length, not just two letters. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate:
words = {"abab", "a"}: The longest palindrome that can be formed is "ababa" with a length of 5. words = {"ab", "aba", "xy"}: The longest palindrome that can be formed is "ababa" with a length of 5. The problem is challenging due to the added complexity of handling words of varying lengths. I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how to approach solving this problem.
constraints:- 0<=words.length<=1000 0<=words[i]<=1000