move zeros in an array to the end - c++

Question

"The question comes under a broad category of "Array Transformation". This category is the meat of tech interviews. Mostly because arrays are such a simple and easy to use data structure. Traversal or representation doesn't require any boilerplate code and most of your code will look like the Pseudocode itself.
The 2 requirements of the question are:
Move all the 0's to the end of array.
All the non-zero elements must retain their original order."
My thinking:
to find the zeros and exchange their positions with the last numbers
/* int swap;
int n=nums.size()-1;
for(int i=0;i<nums.size();i--){
if(nums[i]==0){
swap = nums[i];
nums[i] = nums[n];
nums[n] = swap;
n--;
}
}
My input
[0,1,0,3,12]
Output
[1,3,12,0,0]
Diff
Expected
[1,3,12,0,0]
And I did not know why the correct answer(the part) is :
(int n = 0, cur = 0; cur < nums.size(); cur++) {
if (nums[cur] != 0) {
swap(nums[n++], nums[cur]);
}
}
}

Answer 1

Can you use the standard library? std::stable_partition() makes it trivial. Something like
std::stable_partition(nums.begin(), nums.end(),
[](const auto &n){ return n != 0; });
For the question of how the solution in your post works:
At the start of the first iteration, n is 0, cur is 0, and nums is [0,1,0,3,12]. nums[cur] is 0, so nothing happens. At the start of the second iteration, cur is 1, and nums[cur] is 1, so the swap and increment of n happens.
Now n is 1, cur is 2, and nums is [1,0,0,3,12]. nums[cur] is 0, so nothing happens in the third iteration. In the fourth iteration, with cur now 3, a swap happens. So at the start of the the fifth iteration, n is 2, cur is 4, and nums is [1,3,0,0,12]. I'll leave it to you to work out what happens in that step.
Basically, when n is not equal to cur, it's the index of a 0 element that can be swapped with a non-0 element that cur is the index of. This swapping eventually moves all 0's to the end.

Answer 2

My take on the problem, minimal std library usage. Probably not the most efficient, but it does the trick.
#include "stdafx.h"
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
int src[] = { 0, 1, 0, 3, 0, 12 }; // Output: 1 3 12 0 0 0 check
// = { 0, 3, 0, 1, 0, 0, 12, 0, 5 }; // Output: 3 1 12 5 0 0 0 0 0 check
int n = sizeof(src) / sizeof(src[0]);
for (int x = 0; x < n; x++) {
for (int y = x + 1; y < n; y++) {
if (src[x] == 0 && src[y] != 0) {
int swap = src[x];
src[x] = src[y];
src[y] = swap;
}
}
}
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
std::cout << src[i] << " ";
}
return 0;
}