Leetcode 844. Backspace String Compare

Gary Chiang
1 min readSep 20, 2021

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[easy][IBM]

Given two strings s and t, return true if they are equal when both are typed into empty text editors. '#' means a backspace character.

Note that after backspacing an empty text, the text will continue empty.

Example 1:

Input: s = "ab#c", t = "ad#c"
Output: true
Explanation: Both s and t become "ac".

Example 2:

Input: s = "ab##", t = "c#d#"
Output: true
Explanation: Both s and t become "".

Example 3:

Input: s = "a##c", t = "#a#c"
Output: true
Explanation: Both s and t become "c".

Example 4:

Input: s = "a#c", t = "b"
Output: false
Explanation: s becomes "c" while t becomes "b".

Constraints:

  • 1 <= s.length, t.length <= 200
  • s and t only contain lowercase letters and '#' characters.

Follow up: Can you solve it in O(n) time and O(1) space?

[Java-Gary]

  1. create a function to get the updated string
  2. using string builder to create another string. Start at the end of the character, if we see ‘#’, add the count, and if current character is not ‘#’ and count is not zero, we could skip the character.
  3. else add the character in the new stringbuilder
  4. reverse the string, and return string

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Gary Chiang
Gary Chiang

Written by Gary Chiang

CS new grad, 6 years experience related to supply chain management. Located in Bay area

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