1638. Count Substrings That Differ by One Character

Given two strings s and t, find the number of ways you can choose a non-empty substring of s and replace a single character by a different character such that the resulting substring is a substring of t. In other words, find the number of substrings in s that differ from some substring in t by exactly one character.

We just need to compare the substring of t and s and see if the difference is 1.

We can set up two pointers, both pointing to the same index of s and t. While the pointers move forward, we would accumulate the difference, if the difference is larger than one, which cannot be counted, we would break the loop.

We would try to use the above method for all the indexes of s and t.

class Solution {
public:
    int countSubstrings(string s, string t) {
        int ans = 0;
        for(int i = 0; i < t.size(); i++){
            for(int j = 0; j < s.size(); j++){
                int x = i;
                int y = j;
                int diff = 0;
                while(x < t.size() && y < s.size()){
                    if(t[x] != s[y])diff++;
                    if(diff == 1)ans++;
                    if(diff == 2)break;
                    x++;
                    y++;
                }
            }
        }
        return ans;
    }
};