Solution: Minimum Window Subsequence

Explore how to solve the Minimum Window Subsequence problem by using the sliding window technique. Learn to identify the shortest substring of one string containing all characters of another in order. Understand an efficient approach with forward and backward scans, optimizing time and space complexity. This lesson equips you to implement this solution method confidently.

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Statement
Solution
- Naive approach
- Optimized approach using sliding window

Statement

Given two strings, s1 and s2, find and return the shortest substring of s1 in which all the characters of s2 appear in the same order, but not necessarily next to each other (i.e., s2 should be a subsequence of the substring).

If no such substring exists, return an empty string "". If there are multiple shortest substrings, return the one that appears first in s1 (i.e., with the left-most starting index).

Note: A substring is a contiguous sequence of characters within a string. A subsequence is a sequence of characters that can be derived from a string by deleting some characters without changing the order of the remaining characters. For example, “edu” is a substring and “cave” is a subsequence of “educative.”

Constraints:

$1 \leq$ s1.length $\leq 2 \times 10^{3}$
$1 \leq$ s2.length ...