[LeetCode]3. Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters

Description

Given a string, find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.

Example

Given "abcabcbb", the answer is "abc", which the length is 3.

Given "bbbbb", the answer is "b", with the length of 1.

Given "pwwkew", the answer is "wke", with the length of 3. Note that the answer must be a substring, "pwke" is a subsequence and not a substring.

Discussion

这个问题咋一看最直观的想法就是，当指针p走到一个新的位置的时候，往前搜索看从子串起始位置startLoc到p之间有没有p位置上的字符。如果有一个位置tmp和p上的字符相同的话，就把起始位置startLoc更改为tmp。

而这个过程可以优化的地方在于可以用一个数组lastLoc来记录每个字符上一次出现的位置。这样就不用每次都搜索一遍。

算法的时间复杂度为O(n)。

C++ Code

class Solution {
public:
    int lengthOfLongestSubstring(string s) {
        vector<int> lastLoc(256, -1);
        int startLoc = -1;
        int maxLen = 0;
        for(int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++)
        {
            if(lastLoc[s[i]] > startLoc)
            {
                startLoc = lastLoc[s[i]];
            }
            lastLoc[s[i]] = i;
            if(i - startLoc > maxLen)
            {
                maxLen = i - startLoc;
            }
        }
        return maxLen;
    }
};