Well, to compute the number of trailing zeros, we need to first think clear about what will generate a trailing 0
? Obviously, a number multiplied by 10
will have a trailing 0
added to it. So we only need to find out how many 10
's will appear in the expression of the factorial. Since 10 = 2 * 5
and there are a bunch more 2
's (each even number will contribute at least one 2
), we only need to count the number of 5
's.
Now let's see what numbers will contribute a 5
. Well, simply the multiples of 5
, like 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 35, ...
. So is the result simply n / 5
? Well, not that easy. Notice that some numbers may contribute more than one 5
, like 25 = 5 * 5
. Well, what numbers will contribute more than one 5
? Ok, you may notice that only multiples of the power of 5
will contribute more than one 5
. For example, multiples of 25
will contribute at least two 5
's.
Well, how to count them all? If you try some examples, you may finally get the result, which is n / 5 + n / 25 + n / 125 + ...
. The idea behind this expression is: all the multiples of 5
will contribute one 5
, the multiples of 25
will contribute one more 5
and the multiples of 125
will contribute another one more 5
... and so on. Now, we can write down the following code, which is pretty short.
1 class Solution { 2 public: 3 int trailingZeroes(int n) { 4 int count = 0; 5 for (long long i = 5; n / i; i *= 5) 6 count += n / i; 7 return count; 8 } 9 };