567. Permutation in String

Medium
Hash Table
Two Pointers
String
Sliding Window

Description

Given two strings s1 and s2, return true if s2 contains a permutation of s1, or false otherwise.

In other words, return true if one of s1's permutations is the substring of s2.

 

Example 1:

Input: s1 = "ab", s2 = "eidbaooo"
Output: true
Explanation: s2 contains one permutation of s1 ("ba").

Example 2:

Input: s1 = "ab", s2 = "eidboaoo"
Output: false

 

Constraints:

  • 1 <= s1.length, s2.length <= 104
  • s1 and s2 consist of lowercase English letters.

Hints

Hint 1
Obviously, brute force will result in TLE. Think of something else.
Hint 2
How will you check whether one string is a permutation of another string?
Hint 3
One way is to sort the string and then compare. But, Is there a better way?
Hint 4
If one string is a permutation of another string then they must have one common metric. What is that?
Hint 5
Both strings must have same character frequencies, if one is permutation of another. Which data structure should be used to store frequencies?
Hint 6
What about hash table? An array of size 26?

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