2743. Count Substrings Without Repeating Character 🔒

Description

You are given a string s consisting only of lowercase English letters. We call a substring special if it contains no character which has occurred at least twice (in other words, it does not contain a repeating character). Your task is to count the number of special substrings. For example, in the string "pop", the substring "po" is a special substring, however, "pop" is not special (since 'p' has occurred twice).

Return the number of special substrings.

A substring is a contiguous sequence of characters within a string. For example, "abc" is a substring of "abcd", but "acd" is not.

Example 1:

Input: s = "abcd"
Output: 10
Explanation: Since each character occurs once, every substring is a special substring. We have 4 substrings of length one, 3 of length two, 2 of length three, and 1 substring of length four. So overall there are 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10 special substrings.

Example 2:

Input: s = "ooo"
Output: 3
Explanation: Any substring with a length of at least two contains a repeating character. So we have to count the number of substrings of length one, which is 3.

Example 3:

Input: s = "abab"
Output: 7
Explanation: Special substrings are as follows (sorted by their start positions):
Special substrings of length 1: "a", "b", "a", "b"
Special substrings of length 2: "ab", "ba", "ab"
And it can be shown that there are no special substrings with a length of at least three. So the answer would be 4 + 3 = 7.

Constraints:

1 <= s.length <= 10⁵
s consists of lowercase English letters

Solutions

Solution 1: Counting + Two Pointers

We use two pointers $j$ and $i$ to represent the left and right boundaries of the current substring, and an array $cnt$ of length $26$ to count the occurrence of each character in the current substring. We traverse the string from left to right. Each time we traverse to position $i$, we increase the occurrence of $s[i]$, and then check whether $s[i]$ appears at least twice. If so, we need to decrease the occurrence of $s[j]$ and move $j$ one step to the right, until the occurrence of $s[i]$ does not exceed once. In this way, we get the length of the longest special substring ending with $s[i]$, which is $i - j + 1$, so the number of special substrings ending with $s[i]$ is $i - j + 1$. Finally, we add up the number of special substrings ending at each position to get the answer.

The time complexity is $O(n)$, and the space complexity is $O(C)$. Here, $n$ is the length of the string $s$, and $C$ is the size of the character set. In this problem, the character set consists of lowercase English letters, so $C = 26$.

Python3JavaC++GoTypeScript

class Solution:
    def numberOfSpecialSubstrings(self, s: str) -> int:
        cnt = Counter()
        ans = j = 0
        for i, c in enumerate(s):
            cnt[c] += 1
            while cnt[c] > 1:
                cnt[s[j]] -= 1
                j += 1
            ans += i - j + 1
        return ans

class Solution {
    public int numberOfSpecialSubstrings(String s) {
        int n = s.length();
        int ans = 0;
        int[] cnt = new int[26];
        for (int i = 0, j = 0; i < n; ++i) {
            int k = s.charAt(i) - 'a';
            ++cnt[k];
            while (cnt[k] > 1) {
                --cnt[s.charAt(j++) - 'a'];
            }
            ans += i - j + 1;
        }
        return ans;
    }
}

class Solution {
public:
    int numberOfSpecialSubstrings(string s) {
        int n = s.size();
        int cnt[26]{};
        int ans = 0;
        for (int i = 0, j = 0; i < n; ++i) {
            int k = s[i] - 'a';
            ++cnt[k];
            while (cnt[k] > 1) {
                --cnt[s[j++] - 'a'];
            }
            ans += i - j + 1;
        }
        return ans;
    }
};

func numberOfSpecialSubstrings(s string) (ans int) {
    j := 0
    cnt := [26]int{}
    for i, c := range s {
        k := c - 'a'
        cnt[k]++
        for cnt[k] > 1 {
            cnt[s[j]-'a']--
            j++
        }
        ans += i - j + 1
    }
    return
}

function numberOfSpecialSubstrings(s: string): number {
    const idx = (c: string) => c.charCodeAt(0) - 'a'.charCodeAt(0);
    const n = s.length;
    const cnt: number[] = Array(26).fill(0);
    let ans = 0;
    for (let i = 0, j = 0; i < n; ++i) {
        const k = idx(s[i]);
        ++cnt[k];
        while (cnt[k] > 1) {
            --cnt[idx(s[j++])];
        }
        ans += i - j + 1;
    }
    return ans;
}

2743. Count Substrings Without Repeating Character 🔒

Description

Solutions

Solution 1: Counting + Two Pointers

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