Watch 10 video solutions for Change Minimum Characters to Satisfy One of Three Conditions, a medium level problem involving Hash Table, String, Counting. This walkthrough by NeetCode has 427,716 views views. Want to try solving it yourself? Practice on FleetCode or read the detailed text solution.
You are given two strings a and b that consist of lowercase letters. In one operation, you can change any character in a or b to any lowercase letter.
Your goal is to satisfy one of the following three conditions:
a is strictly less than every letter in b in the alphabet.b is strictly less than every letter in a in the alphabet.a and b consist of only one distinct letter.Return the minimum number of operations needed to achieve your goal.
Example 1:
Input: a = "aba", b = "caa" Output: 2 Explanation: Consider the best way to make each condition true: 1) Change b to "ccc" in 2 operations, then every letter in a is less than every letter in b. 2) Change a to "bbb" and b to "aaa" in 3 operations, then every letter in b is less than every letter in a. 3) Change a to "aaa" and b to "aaa" in 2 operations, then a and b consist of one distinct letter. The best way was done in 2 operations (either condition 1 or condition 3).
Example 2:
Input: a = "dabadd", b = "cda" Output: 3 Explanation: The best way is to make condition 1 true by changing b to "eee".
Constraints:
1 <= a.length, b.length <= 105a and b consist only of lowercase letters.