3303. Find the Occurrence of First Almost Equal Substring

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You are given two strings s and pattern.

A string x is called almost equal to y if you can change at most one character in x to make it identical to y.

Return the smallest starting index of a substring in s that is almost equal to pattern. If no such index exists, return -1.

A substring is a contiguous non-empty sequence of characters within a string.

 

Example 1:

Input: s = "abcdefg", pattern = "bcdffg"

Output: 1

Explanation:

The substring s[1..6] == "bcdefg" can be converted to "bcdffg" by changing s[4] to "f".

Example 2:

Input: s = "ababbababa", pattern = "bacaba"

Output: 4

Explanation:

The substring s[4..9] == "bababa" can be converted to "bacaba" by changing s[6] to "c".

Example 3:

Input: s = "abcd", pattern = "dba"

Output: -1

Example 4:

Input: s = "dde", pattern = "d"

Output: 0

 

Constraints:

  • 1 <= pattern.length < s.length <= 105
  • s and pattern consist only of lowercase English letters.

 

Follow-up: Could you solve the problem if at most k consecutive characters can be changed?

Hints

Hint 1
Let dp1[i] represent the maximum length of a substring of s starting at index i that is also a prefix of pattern.
Hint 2
Let dp2[i] represent the maximum length of a substring of s ending at index i that is also a suffix of pattern.
Hint 3
Consider a window of size pattern.length. If dp1[i] + i == i + pattern.length - 1 - dp2[i + pattern.length - 1], what does this signify?

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