LeetCode-in-Java

451. Sort Characters By Frequency

Medium

Given a string s, sort it in decreasing order based on the frequency of the characters. The frequency of a character is the number of times it appears in the string.

Return the sorted string. If there are multiple answers, return any of them.

Example 1:

Input: s = “tree”

Output: “eert”

Explanation: ‘e’ appears twice while ‘r’ and ‘t’ both appear once. So ‘e’ must appear before both ‘r’ and ‘t’. Therefore “eetr” is also a valid answer.

Example 2:

Input: s = “cccaaa”

Output: “aaaccc”

Explanation: Both ‘c’ and ‘a’ appear three times, so both “cccaaa” and “aaaccc” are valid answers. Note that “cacaca” is incorrect, as the same characters must be together.

Example 3:

Input: s = “Aabb”

Output: “bbAa”

Explanation: “bbaA” is also a valid answer, but “Aabb” is incorrect. Note that ‘A’ and ‘a’ are treated as two different characters.

Constraints:

Solution

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.TreeMap;

public class Solution {
    public String frequencySort(String s) {
        Map<Character, Integer> map = new HashMap<>();
        for (char c : s.toCharArray()) {
            map.put(c, map.getOrDefault(c, 0) + 1);
        }
        TreeMap<Integer, List<Character>> reverseMap = new TreeMap<>(Collections.reverseOrder());
        for (Map.Entry<Character, Integer> c : map.entrySet()) {
            int freq = map.get(c.getKey());
            reverseMap.computeIfAbsent(freq, k -> new ArrayList<>());
            reverseMap.get(freq).add(c.getKey());
        }
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        for (Map.Entry<Integer, List<Character>> freq : reverseMap.entrySet()) {
            List<Character> list = reverseMap.get(freq.getKey());
            for (char c : list) {
                for (int i = 0; i < freq.getKey(); i++) {
                    sb.append(c);
                }
            }
        }
        return sb.toString();
    }
}