Code Room
CodingMediumcod-g803
Subject String parsingLevel Mid–Senior~25 minCommon in Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development

Question

Given a text string and a shorter pattern string (both lowercase), find every starting index in the text where the pattern matches with at most k character mismatches (Hamming distance <= k over the window). Return the list of matching start indices in increasing order. The text length is up to a few thousand characters and 0 <= k <= len(pattern).

Implement
fuzzy_match(text: str, pattern: str, k: int) → list[int]
Examples
in["abcde","axc",1]out[0]
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.

Vibe coding: describe the solution in plain language (or narrate it) and the coach grades your approach. Generating runnable code from your description is coming next.

Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.