How to Solve Shortest Distance to a Character Problem
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Shortest Distance to a Character
Given a string s and a character c that occurs in s, return an array of integers answer where answer.length == s.length and answer[i] is the distance from index i to the closest occurrence of characte...
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Understanding the Shortest Distance to a Character Problem
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Problem Statement
Given a string s and a character c that occurs in s, return an array of integers answer where answer.length == s.length and answer[i] is the distance from index i to the closest occurrence of character c in s. The distance between two indices i and j is abs(i - j), where abs is the absolute value function.
Shortest Distance to a Character
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Examples
s = "loveleetcode", c = "e"[3,2,1,0,1,0,0,1,2,2,1,0]The character 'e' appears at indices 3, 5, 6, and 11 (0-indexed). The closest occurrence of 'e' for index 0 is at index 3, so the distance is abs(0 - 3) = 3. The closest occurrence of 'e' for index 1 is at index 3, so the distance is abs(1 - 3) = 2. For index 4, there is a tie between the 'e' at index 3 and the 'e' at index 5, but the distance is still the same: abs(4 - 3) == abs(4 - 5) = 1. The closest occurrence of 'e' for index 8 is at index 6, so the distance is abs(8 - 6) = 2.
s = "aaab", c = "b"[3,2,1,0]Constraints
1 <= s.length <= 104s[i] and c are lowercase English letters.It is guaranteed that c occurs at least once in s.How Interview Coder Helps with Leetcode Problems
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