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Find the longest substring with k unique characters in a given string in Python
Suppose we have a string we have to return the longest possible substring that has exactly k number of unique characters, if there are more than one substring of longest possible length, return any of them.
So, if the input is like s = "ppqprqtqtqt", k = 3, then the output will be rqtqtqt as that has length 7.
To solve this, we will follow these steps −
N := 26
Define a function is_ok() . This will take count, k
val := 0
for i in range 0 to N, do
if count[i] > 0, then
val := val + 1
return true when (k >= val)
From the main method, do the following −
unique := 0, size := size of s
count := An array of size N, fill with 0
for i in range 0 to size, do
if count of s[i] is same as 0, then
unique := unique + 1
increase count of s[i] by 1
if unique < k, then
there is no such character and exit
start := 0, end := 0
window_length := 1, window_start := 0
count := An array of size N, fill with 0
increase count of s[0] by 1
for i in range 1 to size, do
increase count of s[i] by 1
end := end + 1
while is_ok(count, k) is false, do
decrease count of s[i] by 1
start := start + 1
if end-start+1 > window_length, then
window_length := end-start+1
window_start := start
return substring of s[from index window_start to window_start + window_length]
Example
Let us see the following implementation to get better understanding −
N = 26
def is_ok(count, k):
val = 0
for i in range(N):
if count[i] > 0:
val += 1
return (k >= val)
def k_unique_chars(s, k):
unique = 0
size = len(s)
count = [0] * N
for i in range(size):
if count[ord(s[i])-ord('a')] == 0:
unique += 1
count[ord(s[i])-ord('a')] += 1
if unique < k:
return "Not sufficient characters"
start = 0
end = 0
window_length = 1
window_start = 0
count = [0] * len(count)
count[ord(s[0])-ord('a')] += 1
for i in range(1,size):
count[ord(s[i])-ord('a')] += 1
end+=1
while not is_ok(count, k):
count[ord(s[start])-ord('a')] -= 1
start += 1
if end-start+1 > window_length:
window_length = end-start+1
window_start = start
return s[window_start:window_start + window_length]
s = "ppqprqtqtqt"
k = 3
print(k_unique_chars(s, k))Input
"ppqprqtqtqt", 3
Output
rqtqtqt
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