Is Score of a String easy or hard?

Score of a String is classified as an Easy problem with a very high acceptance rate. The task focuses on simple string traversal and ASCII arithmetic rather than complex algorithms or data structures.

Score of a String Python/Java solution

In Python or Java, iterate through the string and compute the absolute difference between the numeric values of adjacent characters using ord() in Python or character arithmetic in Java. Accumulate the result in a variable while traversing the string once.

How to solve Score of a String in O(n)?

Iterate from index 0 to n-2 of the string. For every position i, calculate abs(ord(s[i]) - ord(s[i+1])) and add it to a running total. This single traversal ensures linear time complexity while using constant additional memory.

What is the best approach for Score of a String?

The best approach is a single-pass iterative traversal of the string. For each adjacent pair of characters, compute the absolute difference between their ASCII values and add it to the total. This method runs in O(n) time with O(1) space and is the standard solution expected in interviews.

Is Score of a String asked at Google/Amazon/Meta?

Score of a String is an Easy-level problem commonly used for screening or warm-up rounds. Similar string traversal problems appear in interviews at companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta to test basic iteration, ASCII operations, and attention to detail.

What data structure is used in Score of a String?

The problem primarily uses a string with sequential indexing. No advanced data structures such as hash maps, stacks, or trees are required because the score depends only on adjacent characters.

What is the time complexity of Score of a String?

The optimal solution runs in O(n) time where n is the length of the string. Each adjacent pair of characters is processed exactly once, and the operations performed are constant-time arithmetic and indexing.

Description Hints 1 Solution Video 3:35

3110. Score of a String

Easy91.4% acceptance5 companies

You are given a string s. The score of a string is defined as the sum of the absolute difference between the ASCII values of adjacent characters.

Return the score of s.

Example 1:

Input: s = "hello"

Output: 13

Explanation:

The ASCII values of the characters in s are: 'h' = 104, 'e' = 101, 'l' = 108, 'o' = 111. So, the score of s would be |104 - 101| + |101 - 108| + |108 - 108| + |108 - 111| = 3 + 7 + 0 + 3 = 13.

Example 2:

Input: s = "zaz"

Output: 50

Explanation:

The ASCII values of the characters in s are: 'z' = 122, 'a' = 97. So, the score of s would be |122 - 97| + |97 - 122| = 25 + 25 = 50.

Constraints:

2 <= s.length <= 100
s consists only of lowercase English letters.

Asked at 5 companies

Google Amazon Bloomberg Microsoft Meta

Topics

String

Hints open one at a time

Hint 1

Sum the difference between all the adjacent characters by just taking the absolute difference of their ASCII values.

3:35

Still stuck?Read 3 approaches, or watch a walkthrough.

Open solution

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1class Solution:
2    def scoreOfString(self, s: str) -> int:
3        

Starter codePython 3Spaces: 4

Examples

Case 1Case 2

Input

"hello"

Input

"zaz"

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