3. Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters

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

Examples:

Given “abcabcbb”, the answer is “abc”, which the length is 3.

Given “bbbbb”, the answer is “b”, with the length of 1.

Given “pwwkew”, 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.

Python:

class Solution(object):
def lengthOfLongestSubstring(self, s):
    """
    :type s: str
    :rtype: int
    """

    left = 0                      # the first place of substring
    ans = 0                       # the length of longest substring            
    last = {}                     # the dict store the last place of string 

    for i in range(len(s)):
        if s[i] in last and last[s[i]] >= left:
            left = last[s[i]] + 1
        last[s[i]] = i
        ans = max(ans, i - left + 1)
    return ans