LeetCode Meditations: Longest Substring without Repeating Characters

Let's start with the description for this problem:

Given a string s, find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.

For example:

lengthOfLongestSubstring('abcabcbb');
// -> 3
// The answer is "abc", with the length of 3.


lengthOfLongestSubstring('bbbbb');
// -> 1
// The answer is "b", with the length of 1.


lengthOfLongestSubstring('pwwkew');
// -> 3
// The answer is "wke", with the length of 3.
// Notice that the answer must be a substring, "pwke" is a subsequence and not a substring.

Since this is a problem that is under the Sliding Window topic, my first intuition was to initialize left and right pointers, and keep growing the window until we see a duplicate character. If we see one, we can increase left one step, and let right be where left is. And, we need to clear the set that keeps our unique letters as we're starting our search for a new substring anew. Otherwise, we'll just add the letters we see to our set, and keep increasing the right pointer; that is, increasing our window size from the right end. We'll also update our maximum length:

function lengthOfLongestSubstring(s: string): number {
  let letters = new Set();
  let left = 0;
  let right = 0;
  let maxLength = 0;

  while (right < s.length) {
    if (letters.has(s[right])) {
      left++;
      right = left;
      letters.clear();
    } else {
      letters.add(s[right]);
      right++;
    }

    maxLength = Math.max(maxLength, right - left);
  }

  return maxLength;
};

Time and space complexity

The time complexity for this solution is $O(n)$ as we iterate through the elements in the string once. The space complexity is also $O(n)$ as letters can contain all the letters in the string in a worst-case scenario where all the letters are unique, making its growth proportional to our input string.

Now, let's take a deep breath because it turns out, there is a slightly better approach.

function lengthOfLongestSubstring(s: string): number {
  let letters = new Set();
  let left = 0;
  let right = 0;
  let maxLength = 0;

  while (right < s.length) {
    while (letters.has(s[right])) {
      letters.delete(s[left]);
      left++;
    } 

    letters.add(s[right]);
    maxLength = Math.max(maxLength, (right - left) + 1);
    right++;
  }

  return maxLength;
};

This solution is adapted from NeetCode. This time we don't reset the entire substring when we find a duplicate as we did in the first version, and we remove only the repeating characters from the set instead of completely emptying it.

Time and space complexity

The time complexity of this version is $O(n)$ again as we iterate through all the characters. The space complexity is also $O(n)$ ; however, this version is more efficient than the first one, mainly given the reason that we don't wipe out the whole set when a duplicate is found.

Next up is Longest Repeating Character Replacement, until then, happy coding.