Short Problem Definition:
Sherlock considers a string to be valid if all characters of the string appear the same number of times. It is also valid if he can remove just 1 character at 1 index in the string, and the remaining characters will occur the same number of times. Given a string , determine if it is valid. If so, return YES, otherwise return NO.
Link
Complexity:
time complexity is O(N)
space complexity is O(1)
Execution:
I optimized this solution to the minimal case that passes all tests on HackerRank. It seems that each character occurs 1 or 2 times. I did not pay the Hackos to verify the input :). The logic of the solution is as follows: count the character counts for each character.
- if they are all equal – it means that all characters occur exactly N times and there is no removal needed
- if 2 or more have less or more characters – there is no way to fix the string in just 1 removal
- if exactly 1 char has a different count than all other characters – remove this char completely and S is fixed.
Solution:
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from collections import Counterdef isValid(S): char_map = Counter(S) char_occurence_map = Counter(char_map.values()) if len(char_occurence_map) == 1: return True if len(char_occurence_map) == 2: for v in char_occurence_map.values(): if v == 1: return True return FalseS = raw_input()if isValid(S): print "YES"else: print "NO" |
