How should I practice Minimum Covering Substring?

Start by reading the full statement, solve the visible examples, then compare the pattern against related ByteDance onsite interview problems in FastPrep.

Is Minimum Covering Substring associated with ByteDance?

FastPrep tags this as a ByteDance onsite interview coding practice problem when the problem catalog has that company and stage context.

Problem · Sliding Window

Minimum Covering Substring

Learn this problem

● Hard

ByteDanceFULLTIMEONSITE INTERVIEW

Problem statement

Given strings s and t, return the shortest contiguous substring of s that contains every character of t with at least its required multiplicity.

Character matching is case-sensitive.
If several covering substrings have minimum length, return the leftmost one.
Return the empty string when no covering substring exists.

Function

minCoveringSubstring(s: String, t: String) → String

Examples

Example 1

s = "ADOBECODEBANC"t = "ABC"return = "BANC"

BANC is the shortest substring containing A, B, and C.

Example 2

s = "aaabcbcba"t = "aabc"return = "aabc"

The substring from index 1 through 4 contains two a characters plus b and c; no shorter window can satisfy four required characters.

Constraints

0 <= s.length, t.length <= 100000.
s and t contain case-sensitive ASCII characters.