readme.md

5. Longest Palindromic Substring

Medium

Given a string s, return the longest palindromic substring in s.

Example 1:

Input: s = "babad"

Output: "bab" Note: "aba" is also a valid answer.

Example 2:

Input: s = "cbbd"

Output: "bb"

Example 3:

Input: s = "a"

Output: "a"

Example 4:

Input: s = "ac"

Output: "a"

Constraints:

• 1 <= s.length <= 1000
• s consist of only digits and English letters.

To solve the Longest Palindromic Substring problem in Java using a Solution class, we'll follow these steps:

1. Define a Solution class with a method named longestPalindrome.
2. Initialize variables to keep track of the start and end indices of the longest palindromic substring found so far (start and end).
3. Iterate through the string s:
   • For each character in the string, expand around it to check if it forms a palindrome.
   • Handle both odd-length and even-length palindromes separately.
   • Update start and end indices if a longer palindrome is found.
4. Return the substring from start to end.
5. Handle edge cases where the input string is empty or has a length of 1.

Here's the implementation:

public class Solution {
    
    public String longestPalindrome(String s) {
        if (s == null || s.length() < 1) return "";
        int start = 0;
        int end = 0;
        
        for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++) {
            int len1 = expandAroundCenter(s, i, i);
            int len2 = expandAroundCenter(s, i, i + 1);
            int len = Math.max(len1, len2);
            if (len > end - start) {
                start = i - (len - 1) / 2;
                end = i + len / 2;
            }
        }
        
        return s.substring(start, end + 1);
    }
    
    private int expandAroundCenter(String s, int left, int right) {
        while (left >= 0 && right < s.length() && s.charAt(left) == s.charAt(right)) {
            left--;
            right++;
        }
        return right - left - 1;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Solution solution = new Solution();

        // Test cases
        String s1 = "babad";
        System.out.println("Example 1 Output: " + solution.longestPalindrome(s1));

        String s2 = "cbbd";
        System.out.println("Example 2 Output: " + solution.longestPalindrome(s2));

        String s3 = "a";
        System.out.println("Example 3 Output: " + solution.longestPalindrome(s3));

        String s4 = "ac";
        System.out.println("Example 4 Output: " + solution.longestPalindrome(s4));
    }
}

This implementation provides a solution to the Longest Palindromic Substring problem in Java.