Solution: Find Longest Self-Contained Substring
Explore how to identify the longest self-contained substring in a lowercase string by using hash maps to track character first and last occurrences. Understand how to expand and validate substring windows efficiently to solve this problem in linear time.
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Statement
You are given a string, s, consisting of lowercase English letters. Your task is to find the length of the longest self-contained substring of s.
A substring t of s is called self-contained if:
tis not equal to the entire strings.Every character in
tdoes not appear anywhere else ins(outside oft).
In other words, all characters in t are completely unique to that substring within the string s.
Return the length of the longest self-contained substring. If no such substring exists, return -1.
Constraints:
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