C Program to check if strings are rotations of each other or not

Last Updated : 11 Jul, 2022

Given a string s1 and a string s2, write a snippet to say whether s2 is a rotation of s1? (eg given s1 = ABCD and s2 = CDAB, return true, given s1 = ABCD, and s2 = ACBD , return false) Algorithm: areRotations(str1, str2)

    1. Create a temp string and store concatenation of str1 to
       str1 in temp.
                          temp = str1.str1
    2. If str2 is a substring of temp then str1 and str2 are 
       rotations of each other.

    Example:                 
                     str1 = "ABACD"
                     str2 = "CDABA"

     temp = str1.str1 = "ABACDABACD"
     Since str2 is a substring of temp, str1 and str2 are 
     rotations of each other.

C

// C program to check if two given strings are rotations of 
// each other
# include <stdio.h>
# include <string.h>
# include <stdlib.h>
 
/* Function checks if passed strings (str1 and str2)
   are rotations of each other */
int areRotations(char *str1, char *str2)
{
  int size1   = strlen(str1);
  int size2   = strlen(str2);
  char *temp;
  void *ptr;
 
  /* Check if sizes of two strings are same */
  if (size1 != size2)
     return 0;
 
  /* Create a temp string with value str1.str1 */
  temp   = (char *)malloc(sizeof(char)*(size1*2 + 1));
  temp[0] = '';
  strcat(temp, str1);
  strcat(temp, str1);
 
  /* Now check if str2 is a substring of temp */
  ptr = strstr(temp, str2);
 
  free(temp); // Free dynamically allocated memory
 
  /* strstr returns NULL if the second string is NOT a
    substring of first string */
  if (ptr != NULL)
    return 1;
  else
    return 0;
}
 
/* Driver program to test areRotations */
int main()
{
    char *str1 = "AACD";
    char *str2 = "ACDA";
 
    if (areRotations(str1, str2))
       printf("Strings are rotations of each other");
    else
       printf("Strings are not rotations of each other");
 
    getchar();
    return 0;
}

Output:

Strings are rotations of each other

Time Complexity: O(n*n), where n is the length of the string.
Auxiliary Space: O(n)

Library Functions Used: strstr: strstr finds a sub-string within a string. Prototype: char * strstr(const char *s1, const char *s2); See http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/Labo/Leo.Liberti/public/computing/prog/c/C/MAN/strstr.htm for more details strcat: strncat concatenate two strings Prototype: char *strcat(char *dest, const char *src); See http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/Labo/Leo.Liberti/public/computing/prog/c/C/MAN/strcat.htm for more details Time Complexity: Time complexity of this problem depends on the implementation of strstr function. If implementation of strstr is done using KMP matcher then complexity of the above program is (-)(n1 + n2) where n1 and n2 are lengths of strings. KMP matcher takes (-)(n) time to find a substring in a string of length n where length of substring is assumed to be smaller than the string. Please refer complete article on A Program to check if strings are rotations of each other or not for more details!