Implement regular expression matching with support for '.'
and '*'
.
'.' Matches any single character. '*' Matches zero or more of the preceding element. The matching should cover the entire input string (not partial). The function prototype should be: bool isMatch(const char *s, const char *p) Some examples: isMatch("aa","a") → false isMatch("aa","aa") → true isMatch("aaa","aa") → false isMatch("aa", "a*") → true isMatch("aa", ".*") → true isMatch("ab", ".*") → true isMatch("aab", "c*a*b") → true
The recursion mainly breaks down elegantly to the following two cases:
- If the next character of p is NOT ‘*’, then it must match the current character of s. Continue pattern matching with the next character of both s and p.
- If the next character of p is ‘*’, then we do a brute force exhaustive matching of 0, 1, or more repeats of current character of p… Until we could not match any more characters.
public class Solution { public boolean isMatch(String s, String p) { if(p.length() == 0) return s.length() == 0; //p's length 1 is special case if(p.length() == 1 || p.charAt(1) != '*'){ if(s.length() < 1 || (p.charAt(0) != '.' && s.charAt(0) != p.charAt(0))) return false; return isMatch(s.substring(1), p.substring(1)); }else{ int len = s.length(); int i = -1; while(i<len && (i < 0 || p.charAt(0) == '.' || p.charAt(0) == s.charAt(i))){ if(isMatch(s.substring(i+1), p.substring(2))) return true; i++; } return false; } } }