395. Longest Substring with At Least K Repeating Characters

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.

思路：先统计每个出现的个数，然后从字符串开头开始遍历 找出第一个不符合出现次数要求的位置，进行递归遍历从开始到这个位置的子串是否符合要求，遍历完之后lastStart+1 从这个位置之后算作新的开始。

public class Solution {
    public int longestSubstring(String s, int k) {
        int n=s.length();
        if(n<k) return 0;
        int []counter=new int[26];
        boolean valid[]=new boolean[26];
        char []dic=s.toCharArray();
        for(int i=0;i<s.length();i++){
            counter[s.charAt(i)-'a']++;
        }
        boolean isValid=true;
        for(int i=0;i<26;i++){
            if(counter[i]>0&&counter[i]<k){
                    isValid=false;
                    valid[i]=false;
            }
            else valid[i]=true;
        }
        if(isValid) return s.length();
        int max=0;
        int lastStart=0;
        for(int i=0;i<n;i++){
            if(valid[dic[i]-'a']==false){
                max=Math.max(max,longestSubstring(s.substring(lastStart,i),k));
                lastStart=i+1;
            }
        }
        max=Math.max(max,longestSubstring(s.substring(lastStart,n),k));
        return max;
    }
}

思路类似 用递归不断缩小范围

public int longestSubstring(String s, int k) {
    char[] str = s.toCharArray();
    return helper(str,0,s.length(),k);
}
private int helper(char[] str, int start, int end,  int k){
    if(end<start) return 0;
    if(end-start<k) return 0;//substring length shorter than k.
    int[] count = new int[26];
    for(int i = start;i<end;i++){
        int idx = str[i]-'a';
        count[idx]++;
    }
    for(int i = 0;i<26;i++){
        if(count[i]==0)continue;//i+'a' does not exist in the string, skip it.
        if(count[i]<k){
            for(int j = start;j<end;j++){
                if(str[j]==i+'a'){
                    int left = helper(str,start,j,k);
                    int right = helper(str,j+1,end,k);
                    return Math.max(left,right);
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return end-start;
}