Leetcode 3: Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters

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

Example 1:

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

Example 2:

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

Example 3:

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.

Solution

The obvious brute-force solution is that we can find all possible substring permutation with unique characters of the input string, which gives you O(n^2) in time complexity. However, we can solve this problem in linear time with one single pass using a sliding window technique. Here is a flow chart of this sliding window.

Let’s take example 3 as demonstration. We will use a hashmap to keep track of unique characters and their index, index i as left window bound and index j as right window bound and we iterate through the string with j. When j = 0, which is letter “p”, it is not in the map so we put is into the map, which becomes {p : 0}. Then we see, “w”, which is also unique, and we put it into the map, which becomes {p : 0, w : 1}. Then when j = 2, we see that the third character is also “w”, which is in our map, and since we can only have unique characters, we will move our left window bound to this position. However, we may have a lot of repeated characters in the map already, and of course in this case, we will take the largest index from the map. Here is implementation.

class Solution {
    public int lengthOfLongestSubstring(String s) {
        Map<Character, Integer> map = new HashMap<>();
        int result = 0;
        
        for(int i = 0, j = 0; j < s.length(); j++) {
            if(map.containsKey(s.charAt(j))) {
                i = Math.max(map.get(s.charAt(j)), i);    
            } 
                result = Math.max(result, j - i + 1);
                map.put(s.charAt(j), j + 1);     
        }   
        return result;        
    }
}