Watch 10 video solutions for Minimize String Length, a easy level problem involving Hash Table, String. This walkthrough by NeetCode has 46,609 views views. Want to try solving it yourself? Practice on FleetCode or read the detailed text solution.
Given a string s, you have two types of operation:
i in the string, and let c be the character in position i. Delete the closest occurrence of c to the left of i (if exists).i in the string, and let c be the character in position i. Delete the closest occurrence of c to the right of i (if exists).Your task is to minimize the length of s by performing the above operations zero or more times.
Return an integer denoting the length of the minimized string.
Example 1:
Input: s = "aaabc"
Output: 3
Explanation:
i = 1 so c is 'a', then we remove s[2] as it is closest 'a' character to the right of s[1].s becomes "aabc" after this.i = 1 so c is 'a', then we remove s[0] as it is closest 'a' character to the left of s[1].s becomes "abc" after this.Example 2:
Input: s = "cbbd"
Output: 3
Explanation:
i = 2 so c is 'b', then we remove s[1] as it is closest 'b' character to the left of s[1].s becomes "cbd" after this.Example 3:
Input: s = "baadccab"
Output: 4
Explanation:
i = 6 so c is 'a', then we remove s[2] as it is closest 'a' character to the left of s[6].s becomes "badccab" after this.i = 0 so c is 'b', then we remove s[6] as it is closest 'b' character to the right of s[0].s becomes "badcca" fter this.i = 3 so c is 'c', then we remove s[4] as it is closest 'c' character to the right of s[3].s becomes "badca" after this.i = 4 so c is 'a', then we remove s[1] as it is closest 'a' character to the left of s[4].s becomes "bdca" after this.
Constraints:
1 <= s.length <= 100s contains only lowercase English letters