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You have been provided with a list of strings and a separator character. Your task is to write a function that splits each string in the list by the given separator and returns a list of the split strings, but excludes any empty strings from the output.

Clarifying Questions:

1. Input Constraints:
   • What is the range of the lengths for the input list and strings?
   • Are there any restrictions on the characters in the strings or the separator?
2. Edge Cases:
   • How should we handle cases where the separator does not appear in the string?
   • How should we handle cases where the entire string is empty or only consists of separator characters?

Code:

def split_strings_by_separator(strings, separator):
    result = []
    for s in strings:
        parts = s.split(separator)
        for part in parts:
            if part:  # ignore empty strings
                result.append(part)
    return result

# Example usage:
strings = ["hello|world", "foo|bar|baz", "a|||b||c"]
separator = "|"
print(split_strings_by_separator(strings, separator))  # Output: ['hello', 'world', 'foo', 'bar', 'baz', 'a', 'b', 'c']

Strategy:

1. Initialization: Start with an empty list result to store the non-empty strings after splitting.
2. Iterate Over Strings: For each string in the input list:
   • Split the string by the given separator, which results in a list of parts.
   • Iterate over each part and add it to the result list only if it is non-empty.
3. Return the Result: After processing all strings, return the result list.

Time Complexity:

• Splitting Each String: Splitting a string by a separator takes O(n) time, where n is the length of the string.
• Iterating Over All Strings: Suppose there are m strings in the list and the average length of each string is n, then splitting all strings will take O(m * n) time.
• Total Time Complexity: O(m * n), which is efficient for reasonably sized input lengths.

This approach ensures that we handle a variety of cases, including strings without the separator, completely empty strings, and strings with consecutive separator characters.

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