LeetCode 395. Longest Substring with At Least K Repeating Characters 假装双指针 分隔符

Find the length of the longest substring T of a given string (consists of lowercase letters only) such that every character in T appears no less than k times.

Example 1:

Input:
s = "aaabb", k = 3

Output:
3

The longest substring is "aaa", as 'a' is repeated 3 times.

 

Example 2:

Input:
s = "ababbc", k = 2

Output:
5

The longest substring is "ababb", as 'a' is repeated 2 times and 'b' is repeated 3 times.

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First, try other methods like DP, double pointers but no one works. Finally, I realised the seperators were key points for this problem:

class Solution:
    def dfs(self, s, k, maxres):
        prev, l = 0, len(s)
        if (l <= maxres or l < k):
            return 0
        d, lst = {}, []
        for ch in s:
            d[ch] = d.get(ch, 0) + 1
        for i in range(l):
            if (d[s[i]] < k):
                lst.append(s[prev:i])
                prev = i + 1
        lst.append(s[prev:]) #bug1
        if (len(lst) > 1):
            for item in lst:
                maxres = max(self.dfs(item, k, maxres), maxres)
        else:
            maxres = max(maxres, l)
        return maxres

    def longestSubstring(self, s: str, k: int) -> int:
        return self.dfs(s, k, 0)