How should I practice Shortest Substring?

Start by reading the full statement, solve the visible examples, then compare the pattern against related Rippling online assessment problems in FastPrep.

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FastPrep tags this as a Rippling online assessment coding practice problem when the problem catalog has that company and stage context.

Problem · String

Shortest Substring

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Problem statement

Determine the length of the shortest contiguous substring that can be deleted from a string s so that the remaining string contains only distinct characters.

After deleting a substring, join the part before it with the part after it. If s already contains only distinct characters, return 0.

Function

findShortestSubstring(s: String) → int

Examples

Example 1

s = "abcbbck"return = 3

Deleting any one of three length-3 choices can leave abck, whose characters are all distinct. No shorter deletion works.

Example 2

s = "xabbcacpqr"return = 3

Delete bca to obtain xabcpqr.

Constraints

1 <= s.length() <= 10^5
s contains only lowercase English letters.