Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions

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Solution: Problem Challenge 3: Smallest Window containing Substring

Problem Statement

Given a string and a pattern, find the smallest substring in the given string which has all the character occurrences of the given pattern.

Example 1:

Input: String="aabdec", Pattern="abc"  
Output: "abdec"  
Explanation: The smallest substring having all characters of the pattern is "abdec"

Example 2:

Input: String="aabdec", Pattern="abac"  
Output: "aabdec"  
Explanation: The smallest substring having all characters occurrences of the pattern is "aabdec"

Example 3:

Input: String="abdbca", Pattern="abc"

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A

Alan Ross

· 4 years ago

I don't understand the purpose of minLength? like it is the length of the entire string + 1, why is it called minLength? There's no explanation as to why it's called that and what it's used for.

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