2186. Minimum Number of Steps to Make Two Strings Anagram II

Problem Link

Description

---

You are given two strings s and t. In one step, you can append any character to either s or t.

Return the minimum number of steps to make s and t anagrams of each other.

An anagram of a string is a string that contains the same characters with a different (or the same) ordering.

 

Example 1:

Input: s = "leetcode", t = "coats"
Output: 7
Explanation: 
- In 2 steps, we can append the letters in "as" onto s = "leetcode", forming s = "leetcodeas".
- In 5 steps, we can append the letters in "leede" onto t = "coats", forming t = "coatsleede".
"leetcodeas" and "coatsleede" are now anagrams of each other.
We used a total of 2 + 5 = 7 steps.
It can be shown that there is no way to make them anagrams of each other with less than 7 steps.

Example 2:

Input: s = "night", t = "thing"
Output: 0
Explanation: The given strings are already anagrams of each other. Thus, we do not need any further steps.

 

Constraints:

• 1 <= s.length, t.length <= 2 * 105
• s and t consist of lowercase English letters.

Solution

---

Python3

class Solution:
    def minSteps(self, s: str, t: str) -> int:
        count1 = Counter(s)
        count2 = Counter(t)
        
        for x in s:
            if count2[x] > 0:
                count2[x] -= 1
        
        for x in t:
            if count1[x] > 0:
                count1[x] -= 1
        
        return sum(count1.values()) + sum(count2.values())