Solution: Find Longest Self-Contained Substring
Explore how to find the longest self-contained substring of a given string by using hash maps to track each character's first and last occurrence. Understand window expansion and validation to ensure all characters in the substring are unique to that segment. This lesson helps you apply hashing techniques to solve substring problems with linear time complexity.
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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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