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Solution: Find Longest Self-Contained Substring

Explore how to identify the longest self-contained substring in a string by leveraging hash maps. Learn to track character occurrences, expand valid windows, and validate substring uniqueness with an efficient O(n) approach.

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:

  • t is not equal to the entire string s.

  • Every character in t does not appear anywhere else in s (outside of t).

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:

  • 22 \leq ...