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.

Is Shortest Substring associated with Rippling?

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

Problem · String

Shortest Substring

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● MediumRipplingINTERNOA

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.