Sliding Window on Arrays in DSA C - Build from Scratch

Sliding Window on Arrays

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are analyzing daily temperatures over a week. You want to find the highest temperature recorded in every 3-day period to understand short-term heat waves.

🎯 Goal: Build a program that uses the sliding window technique to find the maximum temperature in every 3-day window from a list of daily temperatures.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an array called temperatures with exactly these values: 30, 32, 31, 35, 33, 34, 36

Create an integer variable called window_size and set it to 3

Use a for loop with variable i to slide the window over the array and find the maximum temperature in each window

Print the maximum temperatures for each 3-day window separated by spaces

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Sliding window technique is used in weather data analysis, stock price monitoring, and network traffic analysis to find trends over fixed-size periods.

💼 Career

Understanding sliding window helps in roles like data analysis, software development, and system monitoring where processing continuous data streams efficiently is important.

1

Create the temperatures array

Create an integer array called temperatures with these exact values: 30, 32, 31, 35, 33, 34, 36

DSA C

// Your code here

Hint

Use curly braces {} to list the values inside the array.

2

Set the window size

Create an integer variable called window_size and set it to 3

DSA C

int temperatures[] = {30, 32, 31, 35, 33, 34, 36};
// Your code here

Hint

Use int window_size = 3; to set the window size.

3

Find maximum in each sliding window

Use a for loop with variable i to slide the window over temperatures and find the maximum temperature in each window of size window_size. Store the maximum in a variable called max_temp inside the loop.

DSA C

int temperatures[] = {30, 32, 31, 35, 33, 34, 36};
int window_size = 3;
// Your code here

Hint

Use a nested loop: outer loop slides the window, inner loop finds the max in the window.

4

Print the maximum temperatures

Inside the outer for loop, print the variable max_temp followed by a space. After the loop, print a newline character.

DSA C

int temperatures[] = {30, 32, 31, 35, 33, 34, 36};
int window_size = 3;

for (int i = 0; i  max_temp) {
            max_temp = temperatures[j];
        }
    }
    // Print max_temp followed by a space here
}
// Print a newline character here

Hint

Use printf("%d ", max_temp); inside the loop and printf("\n"); after the loop.