Return maximum occurring character in the input string

Write an efficient C function to return maximum occurring character in the input string e.g., if input string is “test string” then function should return ‘t’.

Algorithm:

Input string = “test”
1: Construct character count array from the input string.
  count['e'] = 1
  count['s'] = 1
  count['t'] = 2

2: Return the index of maximum value in count array (returns ‘t’).

Implementation:

• C++
• Python

// C++ program to output the maximum occurring character in a string #include<bits/stdc++.h> #define ASCII_SIZE 256 using namespace std;   char getMaxOccuringChar(char* str) {     // Create array to keep the count of individual characters     int count[ASCII_SIZE];       // Initialize the count array to zero     for (int j=0; j < ASCII_SIZE; j++)         count[j] = 0;       // Utility variables     int len = strlen(str);     int max = -1;     char c;       // Traversing through the string and maintaining the count of     // each character     for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) {         if (max < count[str[i]]) {             max = count[str[i]];             c = str[i];         }     }       return c; }   // Driver program to test the above function int main() {     char* str = "sample string";     cout << "Max occurring character is "          << getMaxOccuringChar(str); }

Implementation:

Output:

Max occurring character is s

Time Complexity: O(n)

Notes:
If more than one character have the same and maximum count then function returns only the first character in alphabetical order. For example if input string is “test sample” then function will return only ‘e’.

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