3. Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters

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

Input: "abcabcbb"
Output: 3 
Explanation: The answer is "abc", which the length is 3.

Input: "bbbbb"
Output: 1
Explanation: The answer is "b", with the length of 1.

Input: "pwwkew"
Output: 3
Explanation: 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.

这道题乍看还是比较简单，但是有很多细节在里面，先给一下实现代码

class Solution(object):
    def lengthOfLongestSubstring(self, s):
        """
        :type s: str
        :rtype: int
        """
        maxlen = 0
        start = 0
        dt = {}
        for i,c in enumerate(s):
            if c in dt:
                start = max(start,dt[c]+1)
            maxlen = max(maxlen,i-start+1)   
            dt[c] = i
        return maxlen 

首先关键就在于：

start = max(start,dt[c]+1)

笔者之前是：

start = dt[c]+1

对比两者的差别，错误样本是：

abba

0,1,2,3

当判断第二个a时，start此时就在2的位置，如果采用笔者之前的，那么start其实在1，但是bb也就是中间已经重复了，换句话说：

......a....c.............c.....a............b................

......a....c.............c.....a............b................

当我们在第二个a的位置时候，原本来说是两个a的之间的长度，但有可能其中间有部分已经重复，例如红色的部分，所以这样做是错的，当使用了

start = max(start,dt[c]+1)

此时start应该在第一个C的下一个位置，所以

i-start后应该是绿色部分，符合我们想要的