Watch 10 video solutions for Shortest Distance to a Character, a easy level problem involving Array, Two Pointers, String. This walkthrough by Nick White has 10,953 views views. Want to try solving it yourself? Practice on FleetCode or read the detailed text solution.
Given a string s and a character c that occurs in s, return an array of integers answer where answer.length == s.length and answer[i] is the distance from index i to the closest occurrence of character c in s.
The distance between two indices i and j is abs(i - j), where abs is the absolute value function.
Example 1:
Input: s = "loveleetcode", c = "e" Output: [3,2,1,0,1,0,0,1,2,2,1,0] Explanation: The character 'e' appears at indices 3, 5, 6, and 11 (0-indexed). The closest occurrence of 'e' for index 0 is at index 3, so the distance is abs(0 - 3) = 3. The closest occurrence of 'e' for index 1 is at index 3, so the distance is abs(1 - 3) = 2. For index 4, there is a tie between the 'e' at index 3 and the 'e' at index 5, but the distance is still the same: abs(4 - 3) == abs(4 - 5) = 1. The closest occurrence of 'e' for index 8 is at index 6, so the distance is abs(8 - 6) = 2.
Example 2:
Input: s = "aaab", c = "b" Output: [3,2,1,0]
Constraints:
1 <= s.length <= 104s[i] and c are lowercase English letters.c occurs at least once in s.