LeetCode力扣之115. Distinct Subsequences

Given a string S and a string T, count the number of distinct subsequences of S which equals T.

A subsequence of a string is a new string which is formed from the original string by deleting some (can be none) of the characters without disturbing the relative positions of the remaining characters. (ie, "ACE" is a subsequence of "ABCDE" while "AEC" is not).

Here is an example:
S = "rabbbit", T = "rabbit"

Return 3.

The idea is the following:

• we will build an array mem where mem[i+1][j+1] means that S[0..j] contains T[0..i] that many times as distinct subsequences. Therefor the result will be mem[T.length()][S.length()].
• we can build this array rows-by-rows:
• the first row must be filled with 1. That’s because the empty string is a subsequence of any string but only 1 time. So mem[0][j] = 1 for every j. So with this we not only make our lives easier, but we also return correct value if T is an empty string.
• the first column of every rows except the first must be 0. This is because an empty string cannot contain a non-empty string as a substring – the very first item of the array: mem[0][0] = 1, because an empty string contains the empty string 1 time.

So the matrix looks like this:

  S 0123....j
T +----------+
  |1111111111|
0 |0         |
1 |0         |
2 |0         |
. |0         |
. |0         |
i |0         |

From here we can easily fill the whole grid: for each (x, y), we check if S[x] == T[y] we add the previous item and the previous item in the previous row, otherwise we copy the previous item in the same row. The reason is simple:

• if the current character in S doesn’t equal to current character T, then we have the same number of distinct subsequences as we had without the new character.
• if the current character in S equal to the current character T, then the distinct number of subsequences: the number we had before plus the distinct number of subsequences we had with less longer T and less longer S.

An example:
S: [acdabefbc] and T: [ab]

first we check with a:

           *  *
      S = [acdabefbc]
mem[1] = [0111222222]

then we check with ab:

               *  * ]
      S = [acdabefbc]
mem[1] = [0111222222]
mem[2] = [0000022244]

And the result is 4, as the distinct subsequences are:

package leetCode;

/**
 * Created by lxw, liwei4939@126.com on 2018/3/25.
 */
public class L115_DistanctSubsequences {

    public int numDistinct(String s, String t){
        int[][] mem = new int[t.length()+1][s.length()+1];

        for (int j=0; j < s.length(); j++){
            mem[0][j] = 1;
        }

        //第一列的值都为0，数组初始化即可满足
        for (int i=0; i<t.length(); i++){
            for (int j=0; j < s.length(); j++){
                if (t.charAt(i) == s.charAt(j)){
                    mem[i+1][j+1] = mem[i][j] + mem[i+1][j];
                } else {
                    mem[i+1][j+1] = mem[i+1][j];
                }
            }
        }
        return mem[t.length()][s.length()];
    }
}