Code RoomMinimum printer operations
HardPrep Room Coding #1461

Minimum printer operations

CodingAlgorithms & data structuresSenior–Staff~35 min

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.

0:00 of about 35 min
InputExpectedGot
["aaabbb"]2not run yetsample