534 Design TinyURL
Background:
TinyURL is a URL shortening service where you enter a URL such as
https://leetcode.com/problems/design-tinyurland it returns a short URL such ashttp://tinyurl.com/4e9iAk.Requirements:
- 1.For instance, "http://tinyurl.com/4e9iAk" is the tiny url for the page "https://leetcode.com/problems/design-tinyurl". The identifier (the highlighted part) can be any string with 6 alphanumeric characters containing
0-9,a-z,A-Z. - 2.Each shortened URL must be unique; that is, no two different URLs can be shortened to the same URL.
Note about Questions:
Below are just a small subset of questions to get you started. In real world, there could be many follow ups and questions possible and the discussion is open-ended (No one true or correct way to solve a problem). If you have more ideas or questions, please ask in Discuss and we may compile it here!
Questions:
- 1.How many unique identifiers possible? Will you run out of unique URLs?
- 2.Should the identifier be increment or not? Which is easier to design? Pros and cons
- 3.Mapping an identifier to an URL and its reversal - Does this problem ring a bell to you?
- 4.How do you store the URLs? Does a simple flat file database work?
- 5.What is the bottleneck of the system? Is it read-heavy or write-heavy?
- 6.Estimate the maximum number of URLs a single machine can store.
- 7.Estimate the maximum number of queries per second (QPS) for decoding a shortened URL in a single machine.
- 8.How would you scale the service? For example, a viral link which is shared in social media could result in a peak QPS at a moment's notice.
- 9.How could you handle redundancy? i,e, if a server is down, how could you ensure the service is still operational?
- 10.Keep URLs forever or prune, pros/cons? How we do pruning? (Contributed by @alex_svetkin)
- 11.What API would you provide to a third-party developer? (Contributed by @alex_svetkin)
- 12.If you can enable caching, what would you cache and what's the expiry time? (Contributed by @Humandroid)
The Idea: If base 10 was our alphabet, then simply generating keys that increment from 0 can provide each url a unique key. Using this same idea, we begin counting from 0 but in base 62. This new alphabet set include lower and uppercase characters, and base 10 digits, which total to 62 characters.
Complexity: O(1) average and O(N) worst time. O(2N) space for bidirectional map. Where N is the number of tiny urls generated.
inline void pause() { cin.ignore(numeric_limits<streamsize>::max(), '\n'); }
class URLService {
public:
string get_tiny(const string &url) {
if (large_to_short_db.find(url) != large_to_short_db.end())
return large_to_short_db[url];
else {
string shortened = base_10_to_base_62(CURRENT_INDEX++);
large_to_short_db[url] = shortened;
short_to_large_db[shortened] = url;
return home_url + shortened;
}
}
auto get_large(const string &url) {
string without_tiny = url.substr(home_url.length(), url.length() - home_url.length());
return short_to_large_db[without_tiny];
}
#ifdef _DEBUG
void generate_keys(const int go_to_COUNTER)
{
int max_base_10_pow = to_string(go_to_COUNTER).length();
for (int i = 0; i <= go_to_COUNTER; i++) {
cout << setw(max_base_10_pow) << i << ": " << home_url + base_10_to_base_62(CURRENT_INDEX++) << endl;
}
}
#endif
private:
static long long CURRENT_INDEX;
const string elements = "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";
const string home_url = "http://tiny.url/";
const int url_base = elements.length();
unordered_map<string, string> large_to_short_db, short_to_large_db;
string base_10_to_base_62(int base10_num)
{
if (base10_num == 0) return "0";
string shortened = "";
while (base10_num != 0) {
string nth_base = string(1, elements[base10_num % url_base]);
shortened.insert(0, nth_base);
base10_num /= url_base;
}
return shortened;
}
};
long long URLService::CURRENT_INDEX = 0; // change for new seed
int main()
{
URLService service1;
service1.generate_keys(1000);
pause();
URLService service2;
service2.generate_keys(1000);
pause();
URLService service3;
string tiny1 = service3.get_tiny("youtube.com"); cout << tiny1 << endl;
string tiny2 = service3.get_tiny("leetcode.com"); cout << tiny2 << endl;
string tiny3 = service3.get_tiny("twitch.tv"); cout << tiny3 << endl;
cout << service3.get_large(tiny1) << endl;
cout << service3.get_large(tiny2) << endl;
cout << service3.get_large(tiny3) << endl;
}
Last modified 3yr ago