LeetCode #424: Longest Repeating Character Replacement

Problem Statement

(Source) Given a string that consists of only uppercase English letters, you can replace any letter in the string with another letter at most k times. Find the length of a longest substring containing all repeating letters you can get after performing the above operations.

Note:
Both the string’s length and k will not exceed 104.

Example 1:

Input:
s = "ABAB", k = 2

Output:
4

Explanation:
Replace the two 'A's with two 'B's or vice versa.

Example 2:

Input:
s = "AABABBA", k = 1

Output:
4

Explanation:
Replace the one 'A' in the middle with 'B' and form "AABBBBA".
The substring "BBBB" has the longest repeating letters, which is 4.

Solution

Idea: The problem says that we can make at most k changes to the string (any character can be replaced with any other character). So, let’s say there were no constraints about the k. Given a string convert it to a string with all same characters with minimal changes. The answer to this is

length of the entire string - number of times of the maximum occurring character in the string

Given this, we can apply the at most k changes constraint and maintain a sliding window such that

(length of substring - number of times of the maximum occurring character in the substring) <= k

class Solution(object):
    def characterReplacement(self, s, k):
        """
        :type s: str
        :type k: int
        :rtype: int
        """
        from collections import Counter

        n = len(s)
        if k >= n - 1:
            return n
        res = k
        start, end = 0, k
        cnt = Counter(s[start : end + 1])
        max_char_fre = cnt.most_common(1)[0][1]
        for end in xrange(k + 1, n):
            cnt[s[end]] += 1
            max_char_fre = max(max_char_fre, cnt[s[end]])
            while end - start + 1 - max_char_fre > k:
                cnt[s[start]] -= 1
                start += 1
                max_char_fre = cnt.most_common(1)[0][1]
            res = max(res, end - start + 1)
        return res