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1624 - Largest Substring Between Two Equal Characters (Easy)

https://leetcode.com/problems/largest-substring-between-two-equal-characters/

Problem Statement

Given a string s, return the length of the longest substring between two equal characters, excluding the two characters. If there is no such substring return -1.

A substring is a contiguous sequence of characters within a string.

Example 1:

Input: s = "aa"
Output: 0
Explanation: The optimal substring here is an empty substring between the two 'a's.

Example 2:

Input: s = "abca"
Output: 2
Explanation: The optimal substring here is "bc".

Example 3:

Input: s = "cbzxy"
Output: -1
Explanation: There are no characters that appear twice in s.

Constraints:

  • 1<=s.length<=3001 <= s.length <= 300
  • ss contains only lowercase English letters.

Approach 1: First nad Last Indices

We can iterate each character in ss and use a hash map to store the first index of the character. If a character is already seen before, the current ii is potentially the last index, we can check if the length im[s[i]]1i - m[s[i]] - 1 is greater than the current answer and update answer.

Written by @wingkwong
class Solution {
public:
int maxLengthBetweenEqualCharacters(string s) {
int ans = -1;
unordered_map<char, int> m;
for (int i = 0; i < s.size(); i++) {
if (m.count(s[i])) {
ans = max(ans, i - m[s[i]] - 1);
} else {
m[s[i]] = i;
}
}
return ans;
}
};