Problem Statement
You are a diamond hunter looking for diamonds in a peculiar mine. This mine is a string of ‘<‘ and ‘>’ characters, and each diamond is a substring of the form “<>”. Each time you find a diamond, you remove it and the residual mine is updated by removing the 2 characters from the string.
For example, if you have a mine like “><<><>>><“, you can start by removing the first appearance of “<>” to get “><<>>><“, then remove the only remaining diamond to get “><>><“. Note that this produces a new diamond which you can remove to get “>><“. Since there are no diamonds left, your expedition is done.
Given a string mine, return the number of diamonds that can be found. Note that the order in which you remove simultaneous appearances of diamonds is irrelevant; any order will lead to the same result.
Definition
Class:
DiamondHunt
Method:
countDiamonds
Parameters:
string
Returns:
int
Method signature:
int countDiamonds(string mine)
(be sure your method is public)
Constraints
–
mine will contain between 1 and 50 characters, inclusive.
–
Each character of mine will be either ‘<‘ or ‘>’.
Examples
0)
“><<><>>><“
Returns: 3
The example from the problem statement.
1)
“>>>><<“
Returns: 0
No diamonds here.
2)
“<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>”
Returns: 9
3)
“><<><><<>>>><<>><<><<>><<<>>>>>><<<“
Returns: 14
[gist https://gist.github.com/vishnujayvel/c9a231d8a58338fa10ac]
coding hangover 