SDE - 1

Given a string ’S’ consisting of lower case English letters, you are supposed to return the longest palindromic substring of ‘S’.

Note that in case of more than one longest palindromic substrings with the same length you need to return the rightmost substring in the given string. For example in string “bbbab”, there are two possible longest palindromic substrings i.e. “bbb” and “bab”, and since you are supposed to return the rightmost substring, so you need to return “bab” as the answer.

Note:

A substring is a contiguous sequence of elements within a string (for example, “bcd” is a substring of “abcde” while “bce” is not).

A string is said to be palindrome if the reverse of the string is the same as the actual string. For example, “abba” is a palindrome, but “abbc” is not a palindrome.

You are given a 2D matrix ‘ARR’ of size ‘N x 3’ having integers, where ‘N’ is the number of rows.

Your task is to find the smallest sum possible while taking one element from each row.

The rules for selecting elements are as follows-

1. In a row, after selecting an element at a given position, you cannot select the element directly below it
2. You can only select elements that are not directly below the previously selected element.

They gave me real time scenario to solve:

How would you handle a lazy colleague?