Substrings That Begin and End With the Same Letter(LeetCode 2083):

Problem

You are given a 0-indexed string s consisting of only lowercase English letters. Return the number of substrings in s that begin and end with the same character.

A substring is a contiguous non-empty sequence of characters within a string.

 

Example 1:

Input: s = "abcba"
Output: 7
Explanation:
The substrings of length 1 that start and end with the same letter are: "a", "b", "c", "b", and "a".
The substring of length 3 that starts and ends with the same letter is: "bcb".
The substring of length 5 that starts and ends with the same letter is: "abcba".

Example 2:

Input: s = "abacad"
Output: 9
Explanation:
The substrings of length 1 that start and end with the same letter are: "a", "b", "a", "c", "a", and "d".
The substrings of length 3 that start and end with the same letter are: "aba" and "aca".
The substring of length 5 that starts and ends with the same letter is: "abaca".

Example 3:

Input: s = "a"
Output: 1
Explanation:
The substring of length 1 that starts and ends with the same letter is: "a".

 

Constraints:

  • 1 <= s.length <= 105
  • s consists only of lowercase English letters.