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Solution: Find Longest Self-Contained Substring

Discover how to identify the longest self-contained substring in a string using hash maps for first and last character occurrences. Learn to expand and validate substrings efficiently, ensuring all characters within are unique and contained. This lesson helps you develop an optimal O(n) time complexity approach for substring problems involving character occurrence tracking.

Statement

You are given a string, s, consisting of lowercase English letters. Your task is to find the length of the longest self-contained substring of s.

A substring t of s is called self-contained if:

  • t is not equal to the entire string s.

  • Every character in t does not appear anywhere else in s ...