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11. Container With Most Water

Medium

You are given an integer array height of length n. There are n vertical lines drawn such that the two endpoints of the ith line are (i, 0) and (i, height[i]).

Find two lines that together with the x-axis form a container, such that the container contains the most water.

Return the maximum amount of water a container can store.

Notice that you may not slant the container.

Example 1:

Input: height = [1,8,6,2,5,4,8,3,7]
Output: 49
Explanation: The above vertical lines are represented by array [1,8,6,2,5,4,8,3,7]. In this case, the max area of water (blue section) the container can contain is 49.

Example 2:

Input: height = [1,1]
Output: 1

Constraints:

  • n == height.length
  • 2 <= n <= 105
  • 0 <= height[i] <= 104

Solution

class Solution:
    def maxArea(self, height: List[int]) -> int:
        left = 0
        right = len(height) - 1
        max_area = 0

        while left < right:
            max_area = max(min(height[left], height[right]) * (right - left), max_area)
            if height[left] < height[right]:
                left += 1
            else:
                right -= 1

        return max_area