Suppose we have a string s and another string t. And t is a subsequence of s. We have to find the maximum length of a substring that we can remove from s so that, t is still a subsequence of s.
So, if the input is like s = "xyzxyxz" t = "yz", then the output will be 4, as We can remove the substring "abca"
To solve this, we will follow these steps −
left := a new list, right := also a new list
c1 := -1, c2 := -1, c3 := -1
j := 0
for i in range 0 to size of s, do
if s[i] is same as t[j], then
insert i at the end of left
j := j + 1
if j is same as size of t , then
c1 := size of s - i - 1
come out from the loop
j := size of t - 1
for i in range size of s - 1 to 0, decrease by 1, do
if s[i] is same as t[j], then
insert i into right at position 0
j := j - 1
if j is same as -1, then
c2 := i
come out from the loop
for i in range 0 to size of t - 1, do
c3 := maximum of c3 and (right[i + 1] - left[i] - 1)
return maximum of c1, c2 and c3
Example (Python)
Let us see the following implementation to get a better understanding −
class Solution: def solve(self, s, t): left = [] right = [] c1 = -1 c2 = -1 c3 = -1 j = 0 for i in range(len(s)): if s[i] == t[j]: left.append(i) j += 1 if j == len(t): c1 = len(s) - i - 1 break j = len(t) - 1 for i in range(len(s) - 1, -1, -1): if s[i] == t[j]: right.insert(0, i) j -= 1 if j == -1: c2 = i break for i in range(len(t) - 1): c3 = max(c3, right[i + 1] - left[i] - 1) return max(c1, c2, c3) ob = Solution() s = "xyzxyxz" t = "yz" print(ob.solve(s, t))
Input
"xyzxyxz", "yz"
Output
4