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Problem · String

Longest Contiguous Character Run

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● Easy

Boston Consulting GroupNEW GRADINTERNOA

Problem statement

You are given a non-empty string source consisting of lowercase English letters.

Find the longest contiguous substring that consists of the same character. If several such substrings have the same maximum length, choose the rightmost one.

Return a string containing the chosen character followed by the number of times it occurs in that substring.

A solution with time complexity no worse than O(source.length^2) fits within the execution time limit.

Function

solution(source: String) → String

Examples

Example 1

source = "bbacccdbbab"return = "c3"

The character a appears in two runs of length 1. The character b appears in three runs: two of length 2 and one of length 1. The single c run has length 3, so it is the longest run and the result is "c3".

Example 2

source = "bbaacaa"return = "a2"

The runs "bb", the first "aa", and the final "aa" all have the maximum length 2. The final "aa" is the rightmost maximum run, so the result is "a2".

Constraints

For this exercise, source.length >= 1.
source consists only of lowercase English letters.