CodingHardcod-g898

Subject Dp on intervalsLevel Senior–Staff~35 minCommon in Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development

Question

A printer can, in one operation, print a contiguous run of a single character, overwriting whatever was there. Given a target string s, return the minimum number of print operations needed to produce s starting from an empty (blank) canvas of the same length. 1 <= len(s) <= 100, s consists of lowercase letters.

Implement

strange_printer(s: str) → int

Examples

in["aaabbb"]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.

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.