Uber — Software Engineer ✅ Passed

Level: Unknown Level

Round: Full Journey · Type: Coding · Difficulty: 2/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Neutral

Topics: String manipulation, Substring search

Location: Mountain View, CA

Interview date: 2026-01-20

Summary

Round 1: Coding

Question: Given a string s consisting of multiple words separated by spaces, and a list of strings elements, identify the first substring in each word of s that matches any string in elements. Once a match is found, wrap the substring in square brackets "[ ]". For example, given "hello uber" and the list ["ll", "ub"], return "he[ll]o [ub]er".

Details

The coding question I got was:

`python def find_and_wrap_substrings(s, elements): words = s.split() result = [] for word in words: found = False for element in elements: index = word.find(element) if index != -1: result.append(word[:index] + "[" + element + "]" + word[index + len(element):]) found = True break if not found: result.append(word) return " ".join(result)

Example usage

s = "hello uber" elements = ["ll", "ub"] print(find_and_wrap_substrings(s, elements)) `

My approach:

1. First, I split the input string into a list of words using the split() method.
2. Then, for each word, I iterated through the list of elements to find the first matching substring.
3. If a match was found, I wrapped the substring in square brackets and added the modified word to the result list.
4. If no match was found, I added the original word to the result list.
5. Finally, I joined the result list back into a string using the join() method.

Key insights:

• The find() method returns the index of the first occurrence of a substring in a string. If the substring is not found, it returns -1.
• String slicing can be used to extract substrings from a string.
• The join() method can be used to concatenate a list of strings into a single string.