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Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns in Go

Solution: Find the Difference

Understand how to identify the index of the extra character in one of two nearly identical strings by using a bitwise XOR approach. Explore step-by-step how this method cancels out matching characters and isolates the unique one, enabling a linear time and constant space solution.

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Statement

Given two strings, str1 and str2, find the index of the extra character that is present in only one of the strings.

Note: If multiple instances of the extra character exist, return the index of the first occurrence of the character in the longer string.

Constraints:

  • 0≤0 \leq str1.length, str2.length ≤1000\leq 1000
  • Either str2.length == str1.length + 1, or, str1.length ==
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