Shopping Cart Billing
An e-commerce company is currently celebrating ten years in business. They are having a sale to honor their privileged members, those who have been using their services for the past five years. They receive the best discounts indicated by any discount tags attached to the product. Determine the minimum cost to purchase all products listed. As each potential price is calculated, truncate it to its integer part before adding it to the total. Return the cost to purchase all items as an integer.
There are three types of discount tags:
- Type 0: discounted price, the item is sold for a given price.
- Type 1: percentage discount, the customer is given a fixed percentage discount from the retail price.
- Type 2: fixed discount, the customer is given a fixed amount off from the retail price.
Example
products = [['10', 'd0', 'd1'], ['15', 'EMPTY', 'EMPTY'], ['20', 'd1', 'EMPTY']]
discounts = [['d0', '1', '27'], ['d1', '2', '5']]The products array elements are in the form [‘price’, ‘tag1’, ‘tag2’, …, ‘tagm-1’]. There may be zero or more discount codes associated with a product. Discount tags in the products array may be ‘EMPTY’, which is the same as a null value. The discounts array elements are in the form [‘tag’, ‘type’, ‘amount’].
- If a privileged member buys product 1 listed at a price of 10 with two discounts available:
- Under discount d0 of type 1, the discounted price is 10 – 10 * 0.27 = 7.30, round to 7.
- Under discount d1 of type 2, the discounted price is 10 – 5 = 5.
- The price to purchase product 1 is the lower of the two, or 5 in this case.
- The second product is priced at 15 because there are no discounts available.
- The third product is priced at 20. Using discount tag d1 of type 2, the discounted price is 20 – 5 = 15.
- The total price to purchase the three items is 5 + 15 + 15 = 35.
Notes: Not all items will have the maximum number of tags. Empty tags may not exist in input, or they may be filled with the string EMPTY. These are equivalent as demonstrated in the example.
Function Description
Complete the function findLowestPrice in the editor below.
findLowestPrice has the following parameter(s):
products[n][m]: a 2D array of product descriptors as strings: price followed by up tom-1discount tagsdiscounts[d][3]: a 2D array of tag descriptors as strings: tag, type, amount
Returns
int: the total amount paid for all listed products, discounted to privileged members’ pricing
This problem is a straightforward hash-map pricing task: store each discount tag by its type and amount, then scan every product, evaluate all valid tags, and keep the minimum eligible price. The key detail is to floor each candidate price before adding it to the final total. Empty tags are ignored, and products with no valid discounts are charged at retail price. The solution is efficient with dictionary lookups and a simple per-product iteration.
