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Strings Construction

Description

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] 4 seconds (js)

  • [input] string a

    String to construct, containing only lowercase English letters.

    Guaranteed constraints:
    1 ≤ a.length ≤ 105.

  • [input] string b

    String containing needed letters, containing only lowercase English letters.

    Guaranteed constraints:
    1 ≤ b.length ≤ 105.

  • [output] integer

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

[JavaScript (ES6)] Syntax Tips

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// Prints help message to the console
// Returns a string
function helloWorld(name) {
console.log("This prints to the console when you Run Tests");
return "Hello, " + name;
}

Solution

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function stringsConstruction(a, b) {
  var count = 0;
  var finding = true;
  var pos;
  b = b.split("");
  while (finding) {
    for (var i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
      pos = b.indexOf(a[i]);
      if (pos >= 0) {
        b.splice(pos, 1);
      } else {
        finding = false;
        break;
      }
    }
    if (finding) {
      count++;
    }
  }
  return count;
}