Code RoomSubstrings with k distinct characters
MediumPrep Room Coding #956

Substrings with k distinct characters

CodingAlgorithms & data structuresMid–Senior~25 min

Given a string s of lowercase letters and an integer k (1 <= k <= 26, 1 <= len(s) <= 10^4), return the number of (contiguous) substrings that contain EXACTLY k distinct characters.

Implement
count_substrings_with_k_distinct(s: str, k: int) → int
Examples
in["pqpqs",2]out7
What a strong answer looks like

State your approach and its time/space complexity out loud before you optimize. Handle the edge cases (empty input, duplicates, overflow), and say why you chose this over the brute force. Green tests are the floor, not the grade.

0:00 of about 25 min
InputExpectedGot
["pqpqs",2]7not run yetsample