122. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock II

🟩 Easy

Question

Say you have an array for which the ith element is the price of a given stock on day i.

Design an algorithm to find the maximum profit. You may complete as many transactions as you like (i.e., buy one and sell one share of the stock multiple times).

Note: You may not engage in multiple transactions at the same time (i.e., you must sell the stock before you buy again).

Example 1:

Input: [7,1,5,3,6,4]
Output: 7
Explanation: Buy on day 2 (price = 1) and sell on day 3 (price = 5), profit = 5-1 = 4.
             Then buy on day 4 (price = 3) and sell on day 5 (price = 6), profit = 6-3 = 3.

Example 2:

Input: [1,2,3,4,5]
Output: 4
Explanation: Buy on day 1 (price = 1) and sell on day 5 (price = 5), profit = 5-1 = 4.
             Note that you cannot buy on day 1, buy on day 2 and sell them later, as you are
             engaging multiple transactions at the same time. You must sell before buying again.

Example 3:

Input: [7,6,4,3,1]
Output: 0
Explanation: In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

One Pass

[1, 7, 2, 3, 6, 7, 6, 7]

We can directly keep on adding the difference between the consecutive numbers of the array if the second number is larger than the first one, and at the total sum we obtain will be the maximum profit.

这道题由于可以无限次买入和卖出。这里我们只需要从第二天开始，如果当前价格比之前价格高，则把差值加入利润中，因为我们可以昨天买入，今日卖出，若明日价更高的话，还可以今日买入，明日再抛出。以此类推，遍历完整个数组后即可求得最大利润。

Complexity

• Time complexity: O(n)

• Space complexity: O(1)

Code

def maxProfit(self, prices: List[int]) -> int:
    profit = 0
    for i in range(1, len(prices)):
        if prices[i] > prices[i-1]:
            profit += prices[i] - prices[i-1]
    return profit