1351. Replace the Substring for Balanced String

Medium
String
Sliding Window

Description

You are given a string s of length n containing only four kinds of characters: 'Q', 'W', 'E', and 'R'.

A string is said to be balanced if each of its characters appears n / 4 times where n is the length of the string.

Return the minimum length of the substring that can be replaced with any other string of the same length to make s balanced. If s is already balanced, return 0.

 

Example 1:

Input: s = "QWER"
Output: 0
Explanation: s is already balanced.

Example 2:

Input: s = "QQWE"
Output: 1
Explanation: We need to replace a 'Q' to 'R', so that "RQWE" (or "QRWE") is balanced.

Example 3:

Input: s = "QQQW"
Output: 2
Explanation: We can replace the first "QQ" to "ER". 

 

Constraints:

  • n == s.length
  • 4 <= n <= 105
  • n is a multiple of 4.
  • s contains only 'Q', 'W', 'E', and 'R'.

Hints

Hint 1
Use 2-pointers algorithm to make sure all amount of characters outside the 2 pointers are smaller or equal to n/4.
Hint 2
That means you need to count the amount of each letter and make sure the amount is enough.

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