763. Partition Labels

A string S of lowercase letters is given. We want to partition this string into as many parts as possible so that each letter appears in at most one part, and return a list of integers representing the size of these parts.

Example 1:

Input: S = "ababcbacadefegdehijhklij"
Output: [9,7,8]
Explanation:
The partition is "ababcbaca", "defegde", "hijhklij".
This is a partition so that each letter appears in at most one part.
A partition like "ababcbacadefegde", "hijhklij" is incorrect, because it splits S into less parts.

Note:

1. S will have length in range [1, 500].
2. S will consist of lowercase letters (‘a’ to ‘z’) only.

方法1: two pointers + greedy

grandyang：https://www.cnblogs.com/grandyang/p/8654822.html

思路：

题意要求把string拆成尽可能多的字串，但是同一个字母不能在超过一个字串中出现。那么在遍历的过程中想要知道一个位置是否能断，需要明确此时所有出现过的字母是否后面不会再出现。换句话说，我们要提前知道每一个字母出现的最后一个位置。所以遍历第一遍来扫出所有字母最后出现在的位置。当第二次遍历时，首先我们记录一个last来对应proposed终点。我们遍历到的每个字母，都有可能要求extend当前proposed终点，i.e. 一个字母出现，它的last必须被包含在当前字串内，直到i == last，此时可以明确所有出现的字母last position都在此之前，可以截断在i，推入一个结果，移动左指针标记的start到i + 1。

Complexity

Time complexity: O(n)
Space complexity: O(1)

class Solution {
public:
    vector<int> partitionLabels(string S) {
        vector<int> result;
        unordered_map<char, int> hash;
        int start = 0, last = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < S.size(); i++) hash[S[i]] = i;
        for (int i = 0; i < S.size(); i++) {
            last = max(last, hash[S[i]]);
            if (i == last) {
                result.push_back(i - start + 1);
                start = i + 1;
            }
        }
        return result;
    }
};