Set matrix to zero-coding question asked by Atlassian, Intuit

Placewit
2 min readJun 21, 2022

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Problem statement:

Given an m x n integer matrix matrix, if an element is 0, set its entire row and column to 0's.

You must do it in place.

Input Format:

Matrix

Output Format:

Matrix with rows and columns having an element zero set to zero.

Sample Input 1:

matrix = [[1,1,1],[1,0,1],[1,1,1]]

Sample Output 1:

[[1,0,1],[0,0,0],[1,0,1]]

Sample Input 2:

matrix = [[0,1,2,0],[3,4,5,2],[1,3,1,5]]

Sample Output 2:

[[0,0,0,0],[0,4,5,0],[0,3,1,0]]

Constraint:

m == matrix.lengthn == matrix[0].length1 <= m, n <= 200-2³¹ <= matrix[i][j] <= 2³¹ — 1

Approach:

If any cell of the matrix has a zero we can record its row and column number. All the cells of this recorded row and column can be marked zero in the next iteration.

We make a pass over our original array and look for zero entries.If we find that an entry at [i, j] is 0, then we need to record somewhere the row i and column j.So, we use two sets, one for the rows and one for the columns.

if cell[i][j] == 0 { row_set.add(i) column_set.add(j) }

Finally, we iterate over the original matrix. For every cell we check if the row r or column c had been marked earlier. If any of them was marked, we set the value in the cell to 0.

if r in row_set or c in column_set { cell[r][c] = 0 }

Time complexity:0(m*n)

Space complexity: O(m+n)

Code:

Thanks for Reading

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