Search Character in Strings | Dataford Interview Questions

Amazon search tools may need to locate a character within a collection of product titles. Given an array of strings and a single target character, return the position of the target's first occurrence when scanning strings from left to right and characters from left to right.

Return the position as [string_index, character_index]. If the character does not appear, return [-1, -1]. The search is case-sensitive.

Formal Specification

Implement find_character(strings, target).

strings is a list of strings.
target is a string containing exactly one character.
The return value is a two-element list of integers, [i, j], where i identifies the string and j identifies the character position within that string.
Return [-1, -1] when no match exists.

Constraints

1 <= len(strings) <= 10^4
Each string contains at most 10^3 characters
target contains exactly one character
Strings may be empty
The search is case-sensitive

Function Signature

def find_character(strings, target):

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