3. Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters

Medium

Given a string s, find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.

Example 1:

• Input: s = "abcabcbb"
• Output: 3
• Explanation: The answer is "abc", with the length of 3.

Example 2:

• Input: s = "bbbbb"
• Output: 1
• Explanation: The answer is "b", with the length of 1.

Example 3:

• Input: s = "pwwkew"
• Output: 3
• Explanation: The answer is "wke", with the length of 3. Notice that the answer must be a substring, "pwke" is a subsequence and not a substring.

Example 4:

• Input: s = ""
• Output: 0

Constraints:

• 0 <= s.length <= 5 * 104
• s consists of English letters, digits, symbols and spaces.

Hint:

1. Generate all possible substrings & check for each substring if it's valid and keep updating maxLen accordingly.

Solution:

To solve this problem, we can follow these steps:

1. Initialize Variables:

   • maxLength to store the maximum length of substring found.
   • charIndexMap to store the last index of each character encountered.
   • start to represent the starting index of the current window.

2. Sliding Window:

   • Iterate through the string with an index end representing the end of the current window.
   • If the character at s[end] is already in the charIndexMap and its index is greater than or equal to start, move the start to charIndexMap[s[end]] + 1.
   • Update the charIndexMap with the current index of s[end].
   • Calculate the current window length (end - start + 1) and update maxLength if it's larger than the previously recorded maximum length.

Let's implement this solution in PHP: 3. Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters

<?php
// Example usage:
echo lengthOfLongestSubstring("abcabcbb") . "\n"; // Output: 3
echo lengthOfLongestSubstring("bbbbb") . "\n";    // Output: 1
echo lengthOfLongestSubstring("pwwkew") . "\n";   // Output: 3
echo lengthOfLongestSubstring("") . "\n";         // Output: 0

?>

Explanation:

1. Initialization:

   • $maxLength is set to 0 to store the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.
   • $charIndexMap is an associative array to keep track of the last index at which each character was seen.
   • $start is initialized to 0 to represent the start of the current substring.

2. Iterating through the String:

   • Loop through each character of the string with the index $end.
   • Check if the character is already in $charIndexMap and its recorded index is within the current substring (i.e., >= $start).
   • If so, move the start to charIndexMap[$char] + 1 to ensure no duplicates in the current window.
   • Update $charIndexMap[$char] to the current index $end.
   • Calculate the length of the current substring and update $maxLength if this length is greater than the previously recorded maximum length.

3. Return Result:

   • Finally, return $maxLength which holds the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.

This solution efficiently finds the desired substring length with a time complexity of O(n), where n is the length of the input string.

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