Minimum Window Substring

Posted 2020-08-09 wxquare的学习笔记

Given a string S and a string T, find the minimum window in S which will contain all the characters in T in complexity O(n).

For example,
S = "ADOBECODEBANC"
T = "ABC"

Minimum window is "BANC".

Note:
If there is no such window in S that covers all characters in T, return the empty string "".

If there are multiple such windows, you are guaranteed that there will always be only one unique minimum window in S.

 

class Solution {
public:
    string minWindow(string s, string t) {
        unordered_map<char,int> m;
        for(char c : t){
            m[c]++;
        }
        int sL = s.length();
        int counter = t.length();
        int start = 0,end = 0;
        int minStart = 0,minLen = INT_MAX;
        
        while(end < sL){
            if(m[s[end]]>0){
                counter--;
            }
            m[s[end]]--;
            end++;
            while(counter == 0){
                if(end-start < minLen){
                    minStart = start;
                    minLen = end-start;
                }
                m[s[start]]++;
                if(m[s[start++]] > 0){
                    counter++;
                }
            }
        }
        if(minLen < INT_MAX)
            return s.substr(minStart,minLen);
        else
            return "";
        
    }
};