Code RoomShortest unique substring
MediumPrep Room Coding #962

Shortest unique substring

CodingAlgorithms & data structuresMid–Senior~25 min

Given a string s of lowercase letters (1 <= len(s) <= 1000), return the length of the SHORTEST substring that occurs exactly once in s. Such a substring always exists for non-empty s (the whole string occurs once unless it is fully periodic, in which case a longer-but-unique length is returned). Return that minimal unique length.

Implement
shortest_unique_substring_len(s: str) → int
Examples
in["aabba"]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 25 min
InputExpectedGot
["aabba"]2not run yetsample