<Codesignal> Strings Construction

Medium

Given two strings a and b, both consisting only of lowercase English letters, your task is to calculate how many strings equal to a can be constructed using only letters from the string b? Each letter can be used only once and in one string only.

Example

• For a = "abc" and b = "abccba", the output should be stringsConstruction(a, b) = 2.

  We can construct 2 strings a = "abc" using only letters from the string b.

• For a = "ab" and b = "abcbcb", the output should be stringsConstruction(a, b) = 1.

Input/Output

• [execution time limit] 0.5 seconds (c)

• [input] string a

  String to construct, containing only lowercase English letters.

  Guaranteed constraints:
  1 ≤ a.length ≤ 10^5.

• [input] string b

  String containing needed letters, containing only lowercase English letters.

  Guaranteed constraints:
  1 ≤ b.length ≤ 10^5.

• [output] integer

  • The number of strings a that can be constructed from the string b.

[C] Syntax Tips

// Prints help message to the console
// Returns a string
char * helloWorld(char * name) {
    char * answer = malloc(strlen(name) + 8);
    printf("This prints to the console when you Run Tests");
    strcpy(answer, "Hello, ");
    strcat(answer, name);
    return answer;
}

---

Solution

int stringsConstruction(char *a,char *b)
{
	long long int alphabet_a[26]={0, }, alphabet_b[26]={0, }, min=1000000;

	for(int i=0;i<strlen(a);i++)
		alphabet_a[a[i]-'a']++;
	for(int i=0;i<strlen(b);i++)
		if(alphabet_a[b[i]-'a']!=0)
			alphabet_b[b[i]-'a']++;

	for(int i=0;i<26;i++)
		if(alphabet_a[i]!=0)
			min=alphabet_b[i]/alphabet_a[i]<min?alphabet_b[i]/alphabet_a[i]:min;

	return min;
}