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2486. Append Characters to String to Make Subsequence

Difficulty Topics

Description

You are given two strings s and t consisting of only lowercase English letters.

Return the minimum number of characters that need to be appended to the end of s so that t becomes a subsequence of s.

A subsequence is a string that can be derived from another string by deleting some or no characters without changing the order of the remaining characters.

 

Example 1:

Input: s = "coaching", t = "coding"
Output: 4
Explanation: Append the characters "ding" to the end of s so that s = "coachingding".
Now, t is a subsequence of s ("coachingding").
It can be shown that appending any 3 characters to the end of s will never make t a subsequence.

Example 2:

Input: s = "abcde", t = "a"
Output: 0
Explanation: t is already a subsequence of s ("abcde").

Example 3:

Input: s = "z", t = "abcde"
Output: 5
Explanation: Append the characters "abcde" to the end of s so that s = "zabcde".
Now, t is a subsequence of s ("zabcde").
It can be shown that appending any 4 characters to the end of s will never make t a subsequence.

 

Constraints:

  • 1 <= s.length, t.length <= 105
  • s and t consist only of lowercase English letters.

Solution

append-characters-to-string-to-make-subsequence.py
class Solution:
    def appendCharacters(self, s: str, t: str) -> int:
        N, M = len(s), len(t)
        j = 0
        curr = 0

        for i, x in enumerate(s):
            if j == M: break

            if x == t[j]:
                curr += 1
                j += 1

        return M - curr