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medium
Concatenate the given words in such a way as to obtain a single word with the longest possible substring composed of one particular letter.
Task Score
100%
Correctness
100%
Performance
100%

An array of N words is given. Each word consists of small letters ('a' − 'z'). Our goal is to concatenate the words in such a way as to obtain a single word with the longest possible substring composed of one particular letter. Find the length of such a substring.

Write a function:

function solution($words);

that, given an array words containing N strings, returns the length of the longest substring of a word created as described above.

Examples:

1. Given N=3 and words=["aabb", "aaaa", "bbab"], your function should return 6. One of the best concatenations is words[1] + words[0] + words[2] = "aaaaaabbbbab". The longest substring is composed of letter 'a' and its length is 6.

2. Given N=3 and words=["xxbxx", "xbx", "x"], your function should return 4. One of the best concatenations is words[0] + words[2] + words[1] = "xxbxxxxbx". The longest substring is composed of letter 'x' and its length is 4.

3. Given N=4 and words=["dd", "bb", "cc", "dd"], your function should return 4. One of the best concatenations is words[0] + words[3] + words[1] + words[2] = "ddddbbcc". The longest substring is composed of letter 'd' and its length is 4.

Write an efficient algorithm for the following assumptions:

  • N is an integer within the range [1..100,000];
  • all the words are non−empty and consist only of lowercase letters (az);
  • S denotes the sum of the lengths of words; S is an integer within the range [1..100,000].
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Solution
Programming language used PHP
Total time used 19 minutes
Effective time used 19 minutes
Notes
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