LeetCode 3361: Shift Distance Between Two Strings Solution

Master LeetCode problem 3361 (Shift Distance Between Two Strings), a medium challenge, with our optimized solutions in Java, C++, and Python. Explore detailed explanations, test your code in our interactive editor, and prepare for coding interviews.

3361. Shift Distance Between Two Strings

Medium

Array String Prefix Sum

Problem Explanation

Explanation:

We can solve this problem by iterating through each character in the strings s and t and calculating the minimum cost to shift the character from s to the corresponding character in t.
For each character, we consider the cost of shifting to the next character in the alphabet and the cost of shifting to the previous character in the alphabet. We choose the minimum cost of the two.
We accumulate the total cost over all characters and return this as the shift distance.

Algorithm:

Initialize a variable shiftDistance to store the total shift distance.
Iterate over each character in the strings s and t.
Calculate the cost of shifting the character to the next character and the cost of shifting to the previous character.
Update the shiftDistance with the minimum cost.
Return the shiftDistance.

Time Complexity: O(n), where n is the length of the strings s and t. Space Complexity: O(1)

Solution Code

class Solution {
    public int shiftDistance(String s, String t, int[] nextCost, int[] previousCost) {
        int shiftDistance = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++) {
            int sIdx = s.charAt(i) - 'a';
            int tIdx = t.charAt(i) - 'a';
            int nextShiftCost = Math.min(nextCost[sIdx], previousCost[tIdx]);
            int prevShiftCost = Math.min(previousCost[sIdx], nextCost[tIdx]);
            shiftDistance += Math.min(nextShiftCost, prevShiftCost);
        }
        return shiftDistance;
    }
}

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