The interview problem was not too difficult. The only issue was that the interviewer was completely silent throughout the whole thing. It just felt like I was taking a proctored test.

The interviewer pasted the problem in, and I told them I solved it. They then pasted in some test cases. This process repeated three times, with the problem building upon the previous one.

The interviewer did not seem to care whether or not I talked or went through my thought process.

I would have appreciated it if the interviewer had actually bothered to look at my code. I made a slight error in my understanding of the problem, which cost me precious time. In most other interviews, the interviewer catches this because they are paying attention.

Just study string parsing and how to split strings.

String parsing problem.

They don't expect optimization, so just go for brute force.