Code RoomSmallest rotation
HardPrep Room Coding #959

Smallest rotation

CodingAlgorithms & data structuresSenior–Staff~35 min

Given a non-empty string s of lowercase letters (1 <= len(s) <= 10^5), return the starting index i (0 <= i < len(s)) such that the rotation s[i:] + s[:i] is lexicographically smallest. If several indices give the same smallest rotation, return the smallest such index.

Implement
smallest_rotation_index(s: str) → int
Examples
in["bbaaccaadd"]out2
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 35 min
InputExpectedGot
["bbaaccaadd"]2not run yetsample