Watch 10 video solutions for Take K of Each Character From Left and Right, a medium level problem involving Hash Table, String, Sliding Window. This walkthrough by NeetCodeIO has 14,779 views views. Want to try solving it yourself? Practice on FleetCode or read the detailed text solution.
You are given a string s consisting of the characters 'a', 'b', and 'c' and a non-negative integer k. Each minute, you may take either the leftmost character of s, or the rightmost character of s.
Return the minimum number of minutes needed for you to take at least k of each character, or return -1 if it is not possible to take k of each character.
Example 1:
Input: s = "aabaaaacaabc", k = 2 Output: 8 Explanation: Take three characters from the left of s. You now have two 'a' characters, and one 'b' character. Take five characters from the right of s. You now have four 'a' characters, two 'b' characters, and two 'c' characters. A total of 3 + 5 = 8 minutes is needed. It can be proven that 8 is the minimum number of minutes needed.
Example 2:
Input: s = "a", k = 1 Output: -1 Explanation: It is not possible to take one 'b' or 'c' so return -1.
Constraints:
1 <= s.length <= 105s consists of only the letters 'a', 'b', and 'c'.0 <= k <= s.length