How to find longest palindrome in a String. Please explain and share some sample code in Java/C?

Question

Sorry for hiding my identity :)

Answer 1

You can find the the longest palindrome using Manacher's Algorithm in O(n) time! Its implementation can be found here and here.
For input String s = "HYTBCABADEFGHABCDEDCBAGHTFYW1234567887654321ZWETYGDE". It finds the correct output which is 1234567887654321.

Here's my Java implementation using the example provided by other users.

class LongestPalindrome {

    /**
     * @param input is a String input
     * @return The longest palindrome found in the given input.
     */
    public static String getLongestPalindrome(final String input) {
        int rightIndex = 0, leftIndex = 0;
        String currentPalindrome = "", longestPalindrome = "";
        for (int centerIndex = 1; centerIndex < input.length() - 1; centerIndex++) {
            leftIndex = centerIndex - 1;  rightIndex = centerIndex + 1;
            while (leftIndex >= 0 && rightIndex < input.length()) {
                if (input.charAt(leftIndex) != input.charAt(rightIndex)) {
                    break;
                }
                currentPalindrome = input.substring(leftIndex, rightIndex + 1);
                longestPalindrome = currentPalindrome.length() > longestPalindrome.length() ? currentPalindrome : longestPalindrome;
                leftIndex--;  rightIndex++;
            }
        }
        return longestPalindrome;
    }

    public static void main(String ... args) {
        String str = "HYTBCABADEFGHABCDEDCBAGHTFYW12345678987654321ZWETYGDE";
        String longestPali = getLongestPalindrome(str);
        System.out.println("String: " + str);
        System.out.println("Longest Palindrome: " + longestPali);
    }
}

The output of this is the following:

marcello:datastructures marcello$ javac LongestPalindrome
marcello:datastructures marcello$ java LongestPalindrome
String: HYTBCABADEFGHABCDEDCBAGHTFYW12345678987654321ZWETYGDE
Longest Palindrome: 12345678987654321

Comments

it fails for "noon". And for all palindromes with even number of characters