1234. Replace the Substring for Balanced String

You are given a string containing only 4 kinds of characters 'Q', 'W', 'E' and 'R'.

A string is said to be balanced if each of its characters appears n/4 times where n is the length of the string.

Return the minimum length of the substring that can be replaced with any other string of the same length to make the original string s balanced.

Return 0 if the string is already balanced.

 

Example 1:

Input: s = "QWER"
Output: 0
Explanation: s is already balanced.

Example 2:

Input: s = "QQWE"
Output: 1
Explanation: We need to replace a 'Q' to 'R', so that "RQWE" (or "QRWE") is balanced.

Example 3:

Input: s = "QQQW"
Output: 2
Explanation: We can replace the first "QQ" to "ER". 

Example 4:

Input: s = "QQQQ"
Output: 3
Explanation: We can replace the last 3 'Q' to make s = "QWER".

 

Constraints:

• 1 <= s.length <= 10^5
• s.length is a multiple of 4
• s contains only 'Q', 'W', 'E' and 'R'.

思路：sliding window，关键是怎么判断什么时候移动2个pointer

1. 不要关注window内，转而关注window外

2. window外的count只要没有QWER的count超过len//4就是OK的

参考：https://leetcode.com/problems/replace-the-substring-for-balanced-string/discuss/408978/JavaC%2B%2BPython-Sliding-Window

from collections import Counter
class Solution(object):
    def balancedString(self, s):
        """
        :type s: str
        :rtype: int
        """
        d = Counter(s)
        target = len(s)//4
        res = len(s)
        i = 0
        for j,c in enumerate(s):
            d[c] -= 1
            while i<len(s) and d['Q']<=target and d['W']<=target and d['E']<=target and d['R']<=target:
                res = min(res, j-i+1)
                d[s[i]] += 1
                i += 1
        return res