README.md

2486. Append Characters to String to Make Subsequence

You are given two strings s and t consisting of only lowercase English letters.

Return the minimum number of characters that need to be appended to the end of s so that t becomes a subsequence of s.

A subsequence is a string that can be derived from another string by deleting some or no characters without changing the order of the remaining characters.

Example 1:

Input: s = "coaching", t = "coding"
Output: 4
Explanation: Append the characters "ding" to the end of s so that s = "coachingding".
Now, t is a subsequence of s ("coachingding").
It can be shown that appending any 3 characters to the end of s will never make t a subsequence.

Example 2:

Input: s = "abcde", t = "a"
Output: 0
Explanation: t is already a subsequence of s ("abcde").

Example 3:

Input: s = "z", t = "abcde"
Output: 5
Explanation: Append the characters "abcde" to the end of s so that s = "zabcde".
Now, t is a subsequence of s ("zabcde").
It can be shown that appending any 4 characters to the end of s will never make t a subsequence.

Constraints:

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

Solutions (Rust)

1. Solution

impl Solution {
    pub fn append_characters(s: String, t: String) -> i32 {
        let s = s.as_bytes();
        let t = t.as_bytes();
        let mut i = 0;

        for j in 0..s.len() {
            if i >= t.len() {
                break;
            } else if t[i] == s[j] {
                i += 1;
            }
        }

        (t.len() - i) as i32
    }
}