CodingHardcod-g806

Subject PalindromesLevel Senior–Staff~35 minCommon in Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development

Question

Given a lowercase string s, count the number of DISTINCT non-empty palindromic substrings (distinct by string content, not by position). For 'aaa' the answer is 2 ('a' and 'aa' and 'aaa' are 3 distinct). For 'abba' the distinct palindromes are 'a','b','bb','abba' = 4. Return that count. Length up to ~2000.

Implement

count_distinct_palindromes(s: str) → int

Examples

in["abba"]out4

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.

Learn the concepts

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.