Day 9 of #90DaysOfDSA: Merge Strings Alternately in Python | Piyush Kumar

🚀 #90DaysOfDSA Challenge – Day 9

Hi folks! 👋
I'm Piyush Kumar, and I'm back with my Day 9 progress in the 90 Days of DSA challenge.

Today, I focused on a popular string manipulation problem:

🔤 Merge Strings Alternately – Combine characters of two strings one by one, and append the rest if one is longer.

🧠 Problem Summary:

You're given two strings, word1 and word2. The task is to merge them character by character. If one string is longer, just add the remaining characters to the end.

Here’s my optimized Python solution:

pythonCopyEditclass Solution:
    def mergeAlternately(self, word1: str, word2: str) -> str:
        merged = []
        len1, len2 = len(word1), len(word2)
        for i in range(min(len1, len2)):
            merged.append(word1[i])
            merged.append(word2[i])

        merged.append(word1[i+1:] if len1 > len2 else word2[i+1:])

        return ''.join(merged)

---

🔍 Key Learnings:

• Efficient string iteration in Python

• Using min() and slicing effectively

• Clean, readable code matters!

---

💻 You can check out the full code here:
👉 Day 9 DSA Solutions GitHub

Let’s keep building the habit! See you on Day 10! 🚀