I'm assuming that removing duplicates means that the result contains at most one occurrence of any character. (Some of the other answers assume that adjacent duplicates only need to be reduced to single occurrences.) The basic algorithm would be:
- initialize the result to the empty string
- loop through each character of the input and if the character is not already present in the result, append it to the result
- return the result
A naive (and very inefficient) implementation would be:
private String removeAnyDuplicates(String userWord)
{
String result = "";
for (int i = 0; i < userWord.length(); ++i) {
char c = result.charAt(i);
if (result.indexOf(c) < 0) {
// negative index indicates not present
result += String.valueOf(c);
}
}
return result;
}
This has two major sources of inefficiency: it creates many intermediate String objects and it has to scan the entire result so far for each character of the input. These problems can be solved by using some other built-in Java classes—a StringBuilder to more efficiently accumulate the result and a Set implementation to efficiently record and test which characters have already been seen:
private String removeAnyDuplicates(String userWord)
{
int len = userWord.length();
StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder(len);
Set<Character> unique = new HashSet<Character>();
for (int i = 0; i < len; ++i) {
char c = result.charAt(i);
// try to add c to set of unique characters
if (unique.add(c)) {
// if it succeeds, this is the first time seeing c
result.append(c);
}
}
return result.toString();
}