ItemSearch | Topcoder Archive

Problem Statement

You are given a String[], items, each element of which represents a single retail item and is formatted as "<description> <price>" (quotes for clarity only). <description> contains a textual description of the item and consists of only lowercase letters ('a'-'z') and spaces (but no leading or trailing spaces). <price> represents the item's price, and is formatted as "$D.CC" (quotes for clarity only), where D is the number of dollars (an integer between 0 and 1000, inclusive, with no extra leading zeros) and CC represents the number of cents (an integer between 00 and 99, inclusive, with exactly 2 digits).

Given a search term consisting entirely of lowercase letters ('a'-'z'), return all the items whose descriptions contain the search term as a substring, sorted in ascending order by price. The constraints will guarantee that no two items will have the same price. The return value is a String[] whose elements are formatted exactly the same as items.

Definition

Class:: ItemSearch
Method:: search
Parameters:: String[], String
Returns:: String[]
Method signature:: String[] search(String[] items, String searchTerm)
(be sure your method is public)

Constraints

items will contain between 1 and 50 elements, inclusive.
Each element of items will be formatted as described in the statement.
Each <description> will be between 1 and 30 characters in length, inclusive.
No two elements of items will have the same <price>
searchTerm will contain between 1 and 30 characters, inclusive.
searchTerm will contain only lowercase letters ('a'-'z').

Examples

{"photographic lens $99.99",
 "autographed photo $4.00",
 "tent $88.88",
 "photo $0.25"}

"photo"

Returns: {"photo $0.25", "autographed photo $4.00", "photographic lens $99.99" }

The three descriptions that contain "photo" as a substring are: "photographic lens", "autographed photo", and "photo".

```
{"nothing you want $1000.99"}
```
```
"stuff"
```
```
Returns: { }
```
An empty String[] is returned when there are no matches.

{"same thing $0.00",
 "same thing $0.02",
 "same thing $0.01"}

"thing"

Returns: {"same thing $0.00", "same thing $0.01", "same thing $0.02" }

Multiple items can have the same description.

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