605. Can Place Flowers

1. Description

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 if n new flowers can be planted in the flowerbed without violating the no-adjacent-flowers rule.

2. Example

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

3. 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

4. Solutions

Greedy

n = flowerbed.size()
Time complexity: O(n)
Space complexity: O(1)

class Solution {
public:
    bool canPlaceFlowers(vector<int> flowerbed, int required_count) {
        if (required_count == 0) {
            return true;
        }

        const int n = flowerbed.size();
        int count = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) {
            if (flowerbed[i] == 0 && (i == 0 || flowerbed[i - 1] == 0) &&
                (i + 1 == n || flowerbed[i + 1] == 0)) {
                flowerbed[i] = 1;
                ++count;

                if (count >= required_count) {
                    return true;
                }
            }
        }

        return false;
    }
};