Problem statement

You have a long flowerbed in which some of the plots are planted, and some are not. However, flowers cannot be planted in adjacent plots.

Given an integer array flowerbed containing 0's and 1's, where 0 means empty and 1 means not empty, and an integer n, return true if n new flowers can be planted in the flowerbed without violating the no-adjacent-flowers rule.

Example 1

Input: flowerbed = [1,0,0,0,1], n = 1
Output: true

Example 2

Input: flowerbed = [1,0,0,0,1], n = 2
Output: false

Constraints

• 1 <= flowerbed.length <= 2 * 10^4.

• flowerbed[i] is 0 or 1.

• There are no two adjacent flowers in flowerbed.

• 0 <= n <= flowerbed.length.

Solution: Check the no-adjacent-flowers rule

A new flower can be planted at the position i only if

flowerbed[i - 1] == 0 && flowerbed[i] == 0 && flowerbed[i + 1] == 0.

If the condition is satisfied, the flower can be planted at the position i. flowerbed[i] is now assigned to 1. Then you can skip checking the rule for the position i + 1 and go directly to the position i + 2.

Code

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
using namespace std;
bool canPlaceFlowers(vector<int>& flowerbed, int n) {
    if (n == 0) {
        return true;
    }
    flowerbed.insert(flowerbed.begin(), 0);
    flowerbed.push_back(0);
    int i = 1;
    while (i < flowerbed.size() - 1) {
        if (flowerbed[i - 1] == 0 && flowerbed[i] == 0 && flowerbed[i + 1] == 0) {
            flowerbed[i] = 1;
            n--;
            i+=2;
        } else {
            i++;
        }
    }
    return false;
}
int main() {
    vector<int> flowerbed{1,0,0,0,1};
    cout << canPlaceFlowers(flowerbed, 1) << endl;
    flowerbed = {1,0,0,0,1};
    cout << canPlaceFlowers(flowerbed, 2) << endl;
}

Output:
1
0

Complexity

• Runtime: O(N), where N = flowerbed.length.

• Extra space: O(1).

Implementation note

• In this implementation, you could insert an element 0 to the front and the back of the vector flowerbed to avoid writing extra code for checking the no-adjacent-flowers rule at i = 0 and i = flowerbed.size() - 1.

• There are a few ways to insert an element into a vector. Here you can see an example of using the methods insert and push_back of a std::vector.

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