- Difficulty: Medium
- Tags: LeetCode, Medium, Hash Table, Math, String, Counting, Prefix Sum, leetcode-2083, O(n), O(1), 🔒, Combinatorics
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.
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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".
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Constraints:
1 <= s.length <= 105
s
consists only of lowercase English letters.