[prog] An interview question

[priya venkateshan]

I attended a job interview of Oracle recently, and I was asked one question
whose answer I'm not sure of.
You are given a set of numbers. You have to arrange them such that the
result from concatenating all the numbers is largest.
Like for e.g you have 114, 81, 8, you are supposed to give the output as
881114. You are not allowed to change the order of digits in the original
numbers given.
Initially, i thought of sorting on the basis of most significant digit, [it
would be 1 for 114, 8 for 81 and 8], but the problem arises when the most
significant digits are the same. It would be cumbersome to keep sorting on
the basis of the next most significant digit, so instead of storing it as
ints, i decided to store the numbers as character strings.
A dictionary-type of sort doesnt work here as the number strings are of
different lengths, so to make them all the same length, i proposed the
following method
if you have 114, 81 and 8,
you make them all of uniform length which is maximum length in the
collection +1
and to pad up the remaining, i suggested repeating the number.
so you would have 1141, 8181, 8888.
Now when you sort it alphabetically or numerically, you'll have 8888, 8181,
1141.

Could anyone tell me why this will not work, and give cases where it might
not?

-- 
The reward for hardwork is only more hardwork. Everything else comes under
side-effects.
Priya Venkateshan,
III B.Tech, InfoTech,
NITK Suratkal
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