Minimum Length of String After Deleting Similar Ends

Please refer to LeetCode for the question details:

https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-length-of-string-after-deleting-similar-ends/description/

Intuition

We will use two pointers to solve this problem. Two pointer pattern is a handy tool and can help us in solving many simple-complex problems

Approach

1. Create a left pointer and initialize with 0
2. Create a right pointer and initialize it with array.length -1
3. Start a while loop which will be valid until left < right
4. If the characters at left and right are the same, continue the loop, else break.
5. Until the left element is equal to its next elment, increment left by one.
6. Until the right element is equal to its previous elment, decrement right by one.
7. If left is euqal to right at this point, it means that we traversed the whole string according to the conditions in the questions and the lenght of the final string is zero. So, return zero at this point.
8. If point 7 is not executed, increment left by one and decrement right by one.
9. If the while loop ended, return right - left + 1

Complexity

• Time complexity: O(n)
• Space complexity: O(1)

Code

Here are the performance metrics:

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https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-length-of-string-after-deleting-similar-ends/solutions/4826022/beats-100-00-of-users-with-typescript-interview-solution